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With Carbon, all loan requests, processes and payments are done via their android platform mobile app.You can borrow from as low as 5 cedis to as high as 1,000 cedis without the need to provide a collateral.All that is required of you as a loan applicant is your bio-data, your photograph, information about your employment and the loan amount you want.Once your loan has been reviewed and you pass the review process, your money is sent via the mobile wallet you applied with.

This innovation not only simplifies consumers’ lives, but allows more merchants to become a part of the electronic payments cycle, giving them the opportunity to safely conduct transactions and appeal to consumers who prefer not using cash. We have seen significant growth rates, and have managed to reach up to 1 million transactions per da

When we founded Fawry, an electronic bill payment and presentment company, we were very aware of the gap between card usage and the limited acceptance points in Egypt. Our aim was to extend acceptance channels beyond the traditional card acceptance points to make life easier for consumers in Egypt.

Fawry’s service is playing a key role in revolutionizing the payment industry in Egypt, a country where only 10% of the population of 85 million people has access to formal banking services.

The probability that a customer would incur financial losses in financial transactions conducted using Fintech is referred to as financial risk particularly when these losses would have been avoided if the same transactions had been conducted on a conventional platform (Keong et al., 2020; Razzaque et al., 2020). Financial risk can also be incurred by the financial service provider thereby distorting the operating budget of the firm. An example of a financial loss according to Khalil and Alam (2020) is when the process of launching a Fintech service has taken a longer time than planned thereby translating to an increase in the total cost of implementation. The prevalence of financial risk has heightened due to the nature of digital technology employed by Fintech, which could lead to recurrence in financial losses driven by electronic fraud (e-fraud) (Keong et al., 2020). These authors also listed other causes or drivers of financial risk as factors related to budgetary exchange framework, currency misrepresentation, and additional exchange fees that accompany the preferred value. 

Mobile money, a technology-driven innovation in financial services, has profoundly penetrated the financial landscape in Sub-Saharan Africa, including banks. Yet, besides anecdotal evidence, little is known about whether mobile money adoption enhances or worsens bank performance. Combining hand-collected data with balance sheet data from Bankscope for a panel of 170 financial institutions over the period 2009-2015, we find a strong positive and significant relationship between the time elapsed since banks’ adoption of mobile money and their performance considering an array of proxies of bank profitability, efficiency and stability. In further investigations, we show how bank specialization and size alter such an association. Our results are robust to using instrumental variables, controlling for bank and macro level confounding factors, bank fixed effects and considering alternative measures of bank performance and mobile money adoption. Furthermore, we show that enhanced income diversification and broadened access to deposits are possible channels through which banks involved in mobile money improve their performance. Overall, our findings highlight the bright side of cooperation between banks and mobile network operators in the provision of mobile money.

Enhancing the Customer Experience with InsurTech Financial service companies understand the demand for mobile. PwC’s recent FinTech Survey notes the significant growth in customers using mobile applications by 2020, and 75% of respondents say the most important impact FinTech will have is an increased focus on the customer.   Similar to FinTech, InsurTechs have many advantages insurance companies can leverage. These lean startups are free from legacy products and processes; they can use emerging technologies to build brand new systems; they can target specific value pools instead of offering lengthy end-to-end solutions that don’t meet everyone’s needs. Overall, InsurTech’s can go to market entirely different than traditional insurance companies. By partnering with InsurTech enterprises, insurers can offer:   Enriched Connectivity. Artificial intelligence (AI) solutions can eliminate friction at several touch points in the customer journey. Chatbots will be able to understand and act on customer queries at any time. With deep learning, chatbot solutions can further interpret sentiment to identify when to introduce a human agent.

They conducted a technical evaluation of the Mojaloop platform. While Mojaloop seemed to provide the required functionality, for a live deployment it lacked definition around auxiliary requirements to move into production.

EthioPay wanted to continue adding value for the Ethiopian banking sector through additional services and products. They wanted to add a number of different switch use cases (e.g. merchants, CICO, etc) to their ATM switch.

Financial inclusion, from my personal perspective, is the creation of value added services for the disadvantaged in the society. From the concept of Barefoot Banking to digital innovations, financial inclusion bridges the inequality financial gap that exists between the rural and the urban settings. My personal mission is to make it possible for the smallholder farmer who lives in the most remote parts of Ghana receive payment for his goods and services through a digital solution.

The Fintech space in Ghana is gradually picking up steam with active participation from the public and private sectors. Government regulations on e-money and mobile money technologies are favourable and aiding adoption and rolling out of new technologies every day targeted at the unbanked population. Out of the 6 major telecommunication companies operating in Ghana, 4 are mobile money enabled, facilitating financial transactions between businesses and consumers. Banks also have rolled out services that target financial inclusions. These positive tides are helping shape the Fintech landscape in Ghana.

Over the last four years, our service has allowed the Ethiopian population to access the following services using their mobile phones:Health advice (HelloDoctor)Market access (HelloMarket / HelloGebeya)Labour market access (HelloJobs / HelloSera)Legal advice (HelloLawyer / HelloTebeka)Mobile Trade service (HelloBroker/ HelloDelela)And, since February 2015, in partnership with select Ethiopian banks and micro finance institutions;

BELCASH TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS PLC is located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and is part of the Information Technology Services Industry. BELCASH TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS PLC has 110 employees at this location and generates $12.21 million in sales (USD).

Founded in 2015, Agrocenta operates a mobile merchanting platform that provides market information, storage and delivery solutions to smallholder farmers in Ghana. According to co-founders Francis Obirikorang and Michael Ocansey, their flagship app, CropChain which enables trade between smallholder farmers and consumers, has rapidly grown from 3,000 to 48,000 registered farmers. The startup also provides credit and insurance facilities for smallholder farmers via its LendIt app.

Through AgroCenta’s CropChain platform, smallholder farmers can execute transactions with accurate information and provide reliable access to financing, inputs and knowledge on agricultural best practices. AgroCenta has increased crop yields of farmers by 40% and increased the average CropChain farmer’s income by 35%.

“Our customers have been asking for a Mukuru App, and we have made sure to develop and present a solution that empowers our customers to send money back home to their families in an even safer and more convenient way. Mukuru has always given its customers the ability to transact when and wherever they need to through our existing USSD and WhatsApp offerings – the Mukuru App adds a richer experience and more control for a customer to manage their profile,”

“Our customers have been asking for a Mukuru App, and we have made sure to develop and present a solution that empowers our customers to send money back home to their families in an even safer and more convenient way. Mukuru has always given its customers the ability to transact when and wherever they need to through our existing USSD and WhatsApp offerings – the Mukuru App adds a richer experience and more control for a customer to manage their profile,”

This paper reports the results of a large-scale field experiment designed to test the hypothesis that group membership can increase participation and prosocial lending for an online crowdlending community, Kiva. The experiment uses variations on a simple email manipulation to encourage Kiva members to join a lending team, testing which types of team recommendation emails are most likely to get members to join teams as well as the subsequent impact on lending. We find that emails do increase the likelihood that a lender joins a team, and that joining a team increases lending in a short window (1 wk) following our intervention. The impact on lending is large relative to median lender lifetime loans. We also find that lenders are more likely to join teams recommended based on location similarity rather than team status. Our results suggest team recommendation can be an effective behavioral mechanism to increase prosocial lending.

As early as 2016, established banking and mobile phone companies were competing alongside specialist start-ups to become leaders in fintech, especially in Africa.In November last year, Nairobi-headquartered Prime Bank launched an international money transfer service in collaboration with London-headquartered SimbaPay, giving Prime Bank customers in Kenya access to mobile payments.

For a successful model, the Arab World can look to Kenya’s development of mobile money or “M-Pesa”. In many ways, the elements that lead to M-Pesa’s success in Kenya are already present in the Arab World. Young people in MENA are digitally savvy, are active on social media and are some of the heaviest users of mobile phones in the world.

The successful adoption of M-Pesa in Kenya reverberated across the African startup scene. It acted as a catalyzer and a signal for young entrepreneurs in Kenya and Africa as a whole: revolutionary ideas could be successfully implemented in Africa and generate both business opportunities and a development path for local communities.

We are starting with Egyptian equities, but we intend to quickly introduce alternative investment options to suit different risk/reward and involvement preferences

Thndr, an Egypt based startup, is now poised to formally launch operation after securing the first new brokerage license granted in the country in over a decade. The startup closed its pre-seed round last December, with investors including Y-Combinator, 4DX Ventures, Endure Capital, The Raba Partnership, and MSA Capital. The startup has just acquired the necessary licensing from the Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA), making it the first company to acquire a brokerage license in Egypt since 2008.

"Our commitment of up to $1 million in funding to address the growing wealth inequality in the United States is not only the right thing to do, but a necessity,"

Kiva's crowdfunding platform, Kiva.org, allows individuals to lend as little as $25 to make a difference in someone's life. Kiva Protocol aims to establish financial identity and credit history for unbanked populations using distributed ledger technology (DLT), with its inaugural project currently being implemented in Sierra Leone.

he London-based digital money transfer services SimbaPay has now launched a new money remittance services that will purely operate via SMS. That means even people with no internet and using just a feature phone can now use SimbaPay to send or receive money. This is a huge step for the company, as it now enters a bigger pool of users, both with smartphones plus internet access combined with those without smartphones and/or not internet access. The new SimbaPay SMS money remittance services went live yesterday, and now users from around the world can use the service on any device from anywhere via the good-old SMS. The new SMS service is powered by artificial intelligence that has seen SimbaPay integrate a chatbot at the other end of the user.

The service will allow customers to send money to bank accounts and mobile wallets in 15 countries, including Uganda, the United Kingdom, India, China and Germany. SimbaPay previously set up a similar service for transfers to Asia with Kenya’s Family Bank in 2018. Africa has been among the most prominent regions for fintech development as users, banks and technology companies have bypassed traditional banking to embrace mobile banking and payment services.

SimbaPay head of operations Victor Karanja said in a statement: “Businesses as well as Kenyans and expatriates with friends and family abroad send over USD 18 billion to other African countries, Asia and Europe annually with several billion Kenya Shillings going through the SimbaPay network.”