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With the booming economy and a population of 80 million this country could be the next gold mine for mobile banking companies.

Smartel Money Ltd is company that is rooted in the Kingdom of Lesotho. The aim and focus of Smartel money is to provide mobile payment services, savings & credit and monetary transfers and serve thus as an alternative to traditional banking systems. We aim to provide to individuals, institutions, organizations, multi-industry sectors and governments with the cutting edge, fresh and innovative financial management system in this ever changing world. We also aim to improve the quality of cloud computing (payment as a service) and interaction between computers and people to achieve their payment processes.

Smartel Money Ltd is company that is rooted in the Kingdom of Lesotho. The aim and focus of Smartel money is to provide mobile payment services, savings & credit and monetary transfers and serve thus as an alternative to traditional banking systems.

This study sought to find out perceptions of employee poaching by employees in telecommunication firms and how these perceptions affected their morale. A survey was conducted in which 30 questionnaires were administered and 27 filled. Results showed that 92% of the population had a positive perception of poaching with 8% having negative perceptions. When a regression analysis was done on the data received, in order to test the significance of the relationship between the variables, p-value for significance did not meet the standard which implies that there is not significant relationship between the variables. According to these results, employee perceptions of poaching do not have any effect on morale.

Anlesinya et al (2014)16 examined whether corporate social responsibility has significant positive effect on the financial performance of MTN Ghana Limited. The study administered questionnaire on 35 management staff of MTN Ghana Limited, employed standard multiple regression and hierarchical multiple regression for the analysis. The research results showed that CSR at the aggregate level did not have significant positive effect on financial performance but community CSR has a positive while environmental CSR has negative effect on financial performance of MTN Ghana Limited. The study however has left key performance indicators of MTN Ghana unexplored lending support for a more comprehensive study in that regard. Vadiraj and Narahari (2014)1 attempted to develop a model that could predict the future trends of average revenue per user (ARPU) so that telecom service providers could formulate a strategy to increase their ARPU. The study using a multiple linear regression has been able to explain that subscriber base; number of operators and percentage of new users added periodically are the main determinants of average revenue per user (ARPU). Rahul and Xue (2012)17 attempted to examine the relationship between some selected factors and their contribution to the revenue of the Telecom industries in China and India. Using time series data collected from secondary sources from 2000 to 2010 on number of subscribers, technology innovation, and government regulation and policies, their granger causality test found no causality running from number of subscribers to the revenue of the telecom Industry in both China and India. They however found a causality running from technological innovation to the revenue of the Telecom Industries in both countries. Shmelev (2013)18 developed a model for calculating Telecom Company’s revenue and margin indicators. The study crafted the model for calculating the revenue of Telecom companies based on the Business Metric Framework (BMF) developed by the TeleManagement Forum, a global non-profit association for service providers in the Telecommunication sector. Examining the relationship between the two categories of KPIs in the BMF, the study concluded that it is possible to  create a function depending on the target KPIs lower levels, to calculate the final financial indicator at given rates and obtain a performance management  tool based on key performance indicators.  

M-Pesa is Africa's most successful mobile money service and the region’s largest fintech platform. M-Pesa is the preferred way to make payments across the continent both for the banked and unbanked due to its safety and unmatched convenience.

It also provides financial services to millions of people who have mobile phones, but do not have bank accounts, or only have limited access to banking services. Now, M-Pesa provides over 42 million people with a safe, secure and affordable way to send and receive money, top-up airtime, make bill payments, receive salaries, get short-term loans and much more.

In early 2020, Vodacom & Safaricom completed the acquisition of the M-Pesa brand from Vodafone Group through a newly created joint venture. The joint venture will accelerate the growth of M-Pesa through Africa by giving both Vodacom and Safaricom full control of the M-Pesa brand, product development and support services as well as the opportunity to expand M-Pesa into new African markets

Safaricom PLC and Ant Financial Services – the world’s largest fintech services provider – have announced a partnership that will allow Kenyans shopping on AliExpress to pay for their purchases using M-PESA.

Safaricom PLC and Ant Financial Services – the world’s largest fintech services provider – have announced a partnership that will allow Kenyans shopping on AliExpress to pay for their purchases using M-PESA.

Kenyans shopping on Aliexpress.com will be presented with M-PESA as one of the payment options when checking out their shopping cart on the website. Once customers select M-PESA, they will then key in their mobile phone numbers and will subsequently receive a prompt on their phones to type their M-PESA PIN to complete the payment.

With Apple introducing the biometrics technologies like Fingerprint identification and now facial recognition on its latest X series phones, biometrics is not only a day-to-day part of consumers’ lifestyles but also opening a whole new doors to biometrics industries and consumers’ financial operating methods.Companies like FIDO Alliance pulling out all the stops to make the biometrics systems standardized and more secured introduces the world to the new era of FinTech with easier, secured and adaptable approach of Biometrics Finances.

The tiresome process of entering long and complicated passwords and initials at every transaction along with the risk of compromising the security of the consumers’ accounts played a major role in accepting the Facial Recognition, Fingerprint scanner, IRIS Sensor and Voice recognition as a method of authentication at a Banking sector. 

Cloud eliminates many data storage management problems that plague dated enterprise infrastructure. Cloud computing in banking offers easy access to data for regulatory reporting, risk mitigation, analytics, deep learning, and discovering risk management anomalies.

Cloud based financial services can scale to meet variable and increasing data volume. Plus clean, consolidated, contextualized data eliminates the blinders caused by data silos. Additionally, on-premise grids typically force banks to allocate compute resources while cloud resources are available on-demand.

Open banking promotes banking and payments technology standardization, drives competition, enhances security of customer account data, and leads to data use innovation. APIs simplify the way financial institutions collect actionable data (e.g. customer purchasing, loan needs, preferred journey patterns, risk profiles, and future income projections).

Cloud computing allows financial institutions to optimize IT resources and remove development constraints based on IT’s capacity to deliver (Cofran, 2011, p. 1). Financial institutions can respond faster to needs of customers by reducing development cycles for new products and scale products as needed because of the flexibility of the cloud (Sriram, 2011, p. 4). Furthermore, cloud computing helps financial institutions standardize applications and infrastructures which simplify the overall enterprise architecture. According to Courbe (2013), having a common infrastructure already in place worldwide enables a system to serve customers more efficiently and effectively globally.

In 2012, two brothers, Chijioke Dozie and Ngozi Dozie, founded Carbon, a Nigerian digital bank start-up. Carbon began as a digital lending company, but now the company provides a variety of services, from payments to savings to investments. According to Dozie, “Our annual report will be released in the second quarter after our financial audit is complete, to gain customer trust, Chijioke Dozie, the CEO, told ProWellTech in 2019 that the company will make Carbon’s financials public.” If you note, before we published the 2019 fiscal year update, we released a year under review in January 2020.Gross profits, profit or loss before and after tax, liabilities and equity, total assets, etc. are included in Carbon’s annual report. Carbon’s year of analysis reveals processed payments, client base, disbursed loans, and investments made on the platform. The business with about 659,000 customers processed N96.54 billion (~$241.35 million) according to Carbon’s year of analysis for fiscal year 2020, which is up 89 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. N25.51 billion (~$63 million) was the disbursement volume for its lending arm, an improvement of 9.1 percent from the 2019 financial year. Investments worth N13.02 billion (~32.55 million) were made on the site, up by 365 percent from FY 2019.The factors that affected these numbers last year, according to the company, included the launch of an iOS app that pushed clients Acquisition, introducing its feature for low-income customers with USSD banking services; and a social chat feature to allow faster transactions. Besides that, Carbon obtained a microfinance bank license in an attempt to become a digital bank. The license implies, according to Dozie, that Carbon’s customers are given additional protection by the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation through depositor insurance. The standard Carbon wallet is now a full-fledged bank account, Dozie says, and clients will transact on the platform like any bank would.

SnapScan combines the agility and speed of a small local startup with the industry knowledge and experience of Standard Bank, Africa’s biggest bank. As a team, we love solving difficult problems, especially when it comes to making fast, easy mobile payments possible! SnapScan is a product of FireID Payments, part of the FireID group, a set of local startups building elegant solutions to a wide range of difficult and interesting problems.

CEO of Abacus Wealth Management, an online investment brokerage. Abacus allows investors to make and execute faster, smarter, more informed decisions on instruments in Kenya's financial markets. CEO of Capital Associates, an investment and holding company with interests in financial services, real estate, agriculture and technology. Previously started and built Kenya’s largest consumer financial news and information site. Experience in mobile money, having led teams that developed mobile banking solutions for Kenyan branches of global banks such as Barclays and Standard Chartered, and several local banks and financial institutions. I keep up to date with changes in the industry and get involved through consulting and advisory. Actively involved in Kenya’s start-up scene as an entrepreneur, a member of the iHub and Venture Capital for Africa (VC4A) communities, as an advisor to several web and mobile start-ups and a writer. My focus is on business and revenue models, financing and venture capital.

According to the World Bank, Ghana is the fastest-growing mobile-money market in Africa. Mobile operators MTN, AirtelTigo and Vodafone currently lead the industry. Banks are pushing digital banking in Ghana, but with less success, according to a report from Tellimer in September. Banks such as Ecobank, Fidelity, Zenith and Standard Chartered can use Ghana’s improving digital infrastructure to widen inclusion, Tellimer says. But the firms points to downside for banks through possible loss of deposits and lower margins on digital products due to the competition. Mobile money may lead to the “cannibalisation” of some banking products, Tellimer says. “Banks will have to fight for transactions and deposits.”

MTN is the dominant player with about 90% of mobile money transactions.

It will take other players a “lot of marketing and effort or very innovative strategies” to compete with MTN,

Consumer research shows that financial insecurity is at an all time high. WorldRemit is working tirelessly to increase transparency and support users by providing easy access to financial services. With WorldRemit’s proprietary technology, each user can now track the money they have been sent, giving them added peace of mind at a time when they need it most.

WorldRemit is one of the first companies in the global payments industry to launch a Transfer Tracker app exclusively with recipients in mind. The digital payments company allows senders in 50 countries to send money via the app or website to recipients in over 150 countries and can choose from multiple payout methods including bank deposits, mobile wallets, mobile airtime top-up and cash pick-up.

M-Pesa is a virtual banking system that provides transaction services through a SIM card. Once the SIM has been inserted into the card slot of the mobile device, users can make payments and transfer money to vendors and family members with SMS messages. Users with no bank accounts can access the numerous M-Pesa outlets distributed across the country. The money that needs to be stored is given to the kiosk attendant, who transfers the amount in digital form to the user’s M-Pesa’s account. Cash collected from M-Pesa is deposited in bank accounts held by Safaricom. The bank accounts serve as regular checking accounts and are insured up to a maximum of 100,000 shillings (or $1000) by the Deposit Protection Fund. M-Pesa provides receipts as proof of transaction. For a transaction to take place, both parties have to exchange each other’s phone numbers because the phone numbers act as account numbers. After settlement, both parties receive an SMS notification with the full name of the counterparty and the amount of funds deposited or withdrawn from the user’s account. The mobile receipt, which is received within seconds, helps to promote transparency for all individuals involved in a transaction.

“With Masterpass, we’re enabling consumers to make secure and simple everyday payments wherever they are and from any connected device, without needing to physically carry their bank cards with them,” says Mark Elliott, Division President, Mastercard, South Africa. “Thanks to our collaboration with SnapScan, we are pleased to offer consumers even more places to pay using Masterpass, which is now the most widely accepted digital wallet in South Africa.”Since its launch in 2013, SnapScan has grown its acceptance exponentially, especially among small businesses that traditionally did not have access to traditional Point of Sale devices and relied on cash payments. It makes accepting digital card payments cheap and easy, with merchants simply needing to display a QR code at the till, online or on a bill.“Given SnapScan’s extensive acceptance footprint, the ability to offer merchants a single QR code, which will accept payment from multiple mobile wallet solutions such as Masterpass, is the driving force behind creating interoperability,” says Lincoln Mali, head of group card and payments at Standard Bank. “We believe that interoperability between digital payments platforms is one of the keys to driving digital payments usage and acceptance in South Africa.”

Each Masterpass transaction is classified as an Authenticated Mobile Transaction by South African banks, ensuring that consumers enjoy the highest protection from fraudsters.

Yes! SnapScan is safe to use on multiple levels: The app requires a PIN to be entered before any transaction can be completed. This prevents anyone who has your phone from making transactions, as your PIN should be known only to you.  Your card details are also encrypted and stored safely and securely on your phone. Even if your phone is stolen, nobody will be able to see or access your card details.

SnapScan is a new innovative mobile payment App on a smartphone. It provides a cashless, card-less payment app that consumers can use at thousands of merchants across South Africa or to make donations to CANSA.  It can be used for customers of any bank in South Africa (not just Standard Bank).

Unique challenges are mainly regulations for Fintech companies usually being a grey area, without enough clarity on what exactly they might fall under.With lack of enough funds and diversity, fundraising is also another challenge for most of the startups in the MENA region.

Tackling these challenges, the EFSE Fund and the SANAD Fund for MSME, advised by Finance in Motion, have partnered with Village Capital and the LHoFT to develop the Fincluders Bootcamp 2017, unique investment readiness program designed for entrepreneurs offering inclusive financial products.

‘Financial Inclusion’ might be the most noble sector of financial technology, solving problems the traditional finance industry won’t — servicing underbanked demographics in areas with poor financial infrastructure.

Bismart was awarded seed capital of Sh1 million in April 2018 by Standard chartered Women in Tech programmed and office space for nine months at IBIZ Africa incubator, as the most innovative and scalable business model in Kenya.

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jul 9- GreenTec Capital, a German investment boutique focused on African start-ups, has entered into an investment agreement with Bismart, a Kenyan start-up insurance aggregator leveraging on digital platforms and technologies to educate and advice customers on the best insurance and investment solutions available in the Kenya market.