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Customers who sign up for the M-Pesa service can convert between e-cash and real cash (these are called cash-in / cash-out transactions), and can transfer e-cash from their account to that of another account holder via SMS.

The Kenyan government's announcement of a new 10 percent tax in March 2013 threatened the future prospects of M-Pesa, Safaricom's mobile money transfer service, which had revolutionized the way money moved in Kenya. The new tax would be levied on all cash transfers but was largely targeted at M-Pesa, which controlled around 80 percent of the cash transfer market.

The Kenyan government's announcement of a new 10 percent tax in March 2013 threatened the future prospects of M-Pesa, Safaricom's mobile money transfer service, which had revolutionized the way money moved in Kenya

The Kenyan government's announcement of a new 10 percent tax in March 2013 threatened the future prospects of M-Pesa, Safaricom's mobile money transfer service, which had revolutionized the way money moved in Kenya.

A free app available for any smartphone, SnapScan works almost like a pocket ATM linked to the user’s debit or credit card account. Instead of handing over a card, customers scan a unique SnapScan logo posted at the cash register with their camera-enabled phone. They enter the amount, type in a pin code (or use touch ID) and a few seconds later the vendor’s phone chimes with a confirmation sent by SMS. It’s quick, painless, and entirely safe, says Ehlers. SnapScan is backed by Standard Bank, one of South Africa’s biggest banks, and uses cutting-edge fraud protection technology. More to the point, he notes, it means that vendors never have access to actual credit card details. “That means no one is noting down your number so he can go shopping later,” says Ehlers.

It’s been so long since 30-year-old Cape Town entrepreneur Kobus Ehlers last used his wallet that he’s not even sure where it is. “My car maybe?” he says as he reflexively scans the cheerfully decorated offices of his startup, SnapScan. When it’s pointed out that leaving a wallet in a car in a city infamous for break-ins and carjackings may not be a good idea, he shrugs. He probably doesn’t even have the equivalent of five dollars in it, he says. “I never use cash. Credit cards are over. There are much better ways to pay for things.”As the co-founder of one of South Africa’s most successful electronic payments apps, Ehlers is of course expected to use his own product. But the real reason he isn’t worried about his wallet is because Cape Town is a city seduced by the idea of cashless and cardless transactions, in no small part because of his company’s success. “You can literally wake up in the morning, buy a cup of coffee, go to your dentist, have lunch, pay your bills, take a taxi, go out for dinner, and donate to your favorite cause without using cash or a card,” says Ehlers. “And in none of that is there any risk of your card details getting stolen, or you getting mugged for your cash.”

It’s been so long since 30-year-old Cape Town entrepreneur Kobus Ehlers last used his wallet that he’s not even sure where it is. “My car maybe?” he says as he reflexively scans the cheerfully decorated offices of his startup, SnapScan. When it’s pointed out that leaving a wallet in a car in a city infamous for break-ins and carjackings may not be a good idea, he shrugs. He probably doesn’t even have the equivalent of five dollars in it, he says. “I never use cash. Credit cards are over. There are much better ways to pay for things.”As the co-founder of one of South Africa’s most successful electronic payments apps, Ehlers is of course expected to use his own product. But the real reason he isn’t worried about his wallet is because Cape Town is a city seduced by the idea of cashless and cardless transactions, in no small part because of his company’s success. “You can literally wake up in the morning, buy a cup of coffee, go to your dentist, have lunch, pay your bills, take a taxi, go out for dinner, and donate to your favorite cause without using cash or a card,” says Ehlers. “And in none of that is there any risk of your card details getting stolen, or you getting mugged for your cash.”

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.

Our process model contributes an in-depth view of how P2P lending platforms should be established and nurtured to complement the existing studies in this rapidly growing research area. In addition, our study also hints at the strategies that can facilitate the various stages. Our model can potentially serve as the foundation for formulating guidelines for the managers of P2P lending platforms, so that they are able to optimize the development of their platforms and extend the benefits of P2P lending to a broader base of customers.

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

Fawry is educating unbanked population to trust electronic payments. Fawry would not have existed in a mature economy, where electronic payments are dominant. In that sense, Fawry is filling a gap left by banking players in Egypt.

One of the most striking differences between banking in Europe and in Egypt is cash management. Withdrawals and deposits of cash are the dominant operations in the Egyptian banking branches. It is frequent to meet customers with big bags of money in or out of banking branches. In Europe, anti-money laundering laws and electronic payments popularity made large cash operations extremely rare.

The success of Fawry comes from leveraging the best of the 2 means of payment: cash for its reliability and availability, and electronic systems for their seamless and fast processing.

This article explores the austere labour regime of Safaricom – Kenya's largest telecommunications firm and financial services provider – from the perspective of the women and men who work as ‘human ATMs’ for Safaricom's breakout service, M-Pesa. Far from women and men simply acting as ATMs, I argue that the affective and social labour of these people working at sites across the country constitutes a form of maintenance work that, while essentially free in Safaricom's accounts, critically underwrites the success of M-Pesa and Safaricom.

I argue that the work of ‘human ATMs’ constitutes both the ‘front story’ and the ‘backstory’ of contemporary modes of accumulation unfolding in Kenya. Their labour is formally exploited while broader forms of work required to build and maintain the social and material networks on which Safaricom depends are expropriated, forming the basis of new frontiers of accumulation. This process is mirrored in Safaricom's contemporary business strategy, which is premised on enclosing people's everyday habits and social networks in their digital forms as sites of innovation and market-making.

Bosire and Kimani launched FarmDrive in May 2015. The digital recordkeeping platform serves as a basis for bankers to establish credit ratings and determine which farmers are best suited for small loans. FarmDrive’s pilot program consisted of 50 farmers. Today hundreds of thousands are in FarmDrive’s database; about 830 have received financing. In turn the banks pay FarmDrive for essentially functioning as their credit bureau for Kenya’s vast farming community. The two entrepreneurs have no intention of stopping there. “There are more than five million small farmers in Kenya,” Bosire says. “Throughout Africa it’s about 50 million. But when we started FarmDrive, we always had global ambitions. We’re building solutions for farmers in Asia too.”

Funded through a government innovation agency and a successful crowdsourcing campaign, the start-up has also won several awards and grants, including best start-up in 2014's Global Innovation through Science & Technology competition.Last year, it was chosen by the International Red Cross as a provider for its Fire Sensors initiative, a project that has distributed 900 of the devices along with extensive market research.Julie Arrighi, Innovation Advisor at the American Red Cross, said that using networked heat sensors like Lumkani is crucial to mitigating the growing risk of slum fires around the world.

The most obvious benefit of crowdfunding for entrepreneurs is the funding. With so many startups on the market, it is hard to gather the money needed to bring ideas to life. Through crowdfunding, ventures that do not have a company builder like FinLeap behind them, can gain support at the very beginning. Crowdfunding provides a way for innovate ideas to be presented attractively, so it can be launched. Moreover, a crowdfunding platform can help successful entrepreneurs to validate their product which can then help with gathering the Series A funding. It makes validation faster and more scalable. Additionally, a crowdfunding platform allows entrepreneurs to get insights from their future customers and experts in the startup field while building awareness for the idea. [3]

Financial-technology companies are changing the face of finance. Over the past ten years, what started mostly as disruption in the payments space has expanded to every corner of finance. Even areas once assumed to be safe are seeing new entrants and competitive threats. Wealth and asset management, wholesale banking, capital markets, regulation and risk (“regtech”), and trade finance are just the most recent areas to see innovation driven by small technology-first players.

Whether fintechs ultimately win or lose significant market share may be beside the point; they are redefining customer expectations and continue to create new business models. As fintechs are frequently building their entire technology stacks from the ground up, they are highlighting incumbent financial institutions’ weaknesses not only in digital user experiences but also in operational efficiency. Whether a new digital brokerage wins or loses may not matter when customer expectations around brokerage fees change. A retail foreign-exchange fintech having 5 or 50 percent of the market may matter less than retail FX margins disappearing for everyone. Whether the next crops of “neobanks” disrupt retail banking may be less important than their highlighting for users and customers the possibilities of a modern, digital-first experience.

f your downside potential from disruptive threats. Incumbents can choose to invest in companies they partner with or to focus on areas they know well or interesting adjacencies. We frequently advise clients to find ways of keeping corporate venture-capital groups slightly at arm’s length to attract skilled managers, and we recently have seen increased interest in investing in established outside managers who focus on financial technology. Transform yourself to be more like a fintech. Digital transformation is a difficult but necessary process for most incumbent financial institutions. Redesigning core infrastructure to be more modular and dynamic, driving a new agile operating model, and upgrading technology and workforce skills are all necessary to compete with outside threats, fintech and otherwise. Build your own (internal) fintech. The road for transformations is normally measured in years, but the competitive threat from fintechs is today. Increasingly, we are seeing financial institutions try to beat fintechs at their own game or self-disrupt areas of their business before others can. The key to success in new digital business building is to combine the agility, speed, and talent of a start-up with the “unfair advantage” of an incumbent by leveraging existing assets (e.g. customers, distribution, or infrastructure). Serve the fintechs. A few financial institutions can find their competitive advantage in creating scaled, efficient technology and operations to enable others to embed financial services in their customer experiences. This “banking as a service” business model depends on finding a profitable path to white labeling but draws on the inspiration of large tech platforms. Enabling the customer experiences of others has quickly moved beyond just enabling fintechs to also working with big technology companies, retailers, telecommunications companies, and beyond. Ignore fintechs. Although ignoring the competition is rarely the right choice, some businesses are built on moats—frequently regulatory—that are difficult to disrupt or they play within narrow markets. Companies should prioritize where they need to focus and in doing so know when they need to pay attention and when they need to avoid the distraction of disrupters.

M-Pesa permet aux détenteurs de mobiles d’effectuer toutes sortes d’achats en un claquement de doigts. Qu’il s’agisse de régler ses factures d’électricité, de rembourser ses frais de scolarité, de réserver des billets d’avions ou tickets de bus ou encore de faire ses emplettes alimentaires, M-Pesa est aujourd’hui devenu un acteur économique incontournable au Kenya depuis sa création en 2007

M-Pesa, joyau de l’opérateur national kényan Safaricom (détenu à 40% par Vodafone), regarde maintenant vers les marchés du Nord, et notamment vers l’Europe de l’Est, à commencer par la Roumanie : pays où la grande majorité de la population est connectée (possède au moins un téléphone mobile) mais pas totalement bancarisée.

Drawing on the existing knowledge of African development from previous publications, Yes Africa Can: Success Stories from a Dynamic Continent takes an in-depth look at 26 economic and social development successes in Sub-Saharan African countries?twenty from individual countries and six that cut across the region. These stories manifest at the project, provincial, sub-national, national, or regional level and across themes, programs, and sectors. The book aims to address how Sub-Saharan African countries have overcome major development challenges. The main components of each case study include: (i) a description of the achievement and the elements that qualify the outcome as successful; (ii) an assessment of the main policies, interventions, actions, and other factors that contributed to the positive outcome; (iii) a presentation of the lessons learned and the contribution to the discourse on African development; and (iv) insights on the usability or applicability of the achievement in terms of the potential for scaling up the interventions and actions. Individual case studies also examine the role of the key stakeholders?the government, donors, or private investors?in facilitating and promoting the achievement. The studies are classified into four categories: overcoming or avoiding massive government failure, rebuilding or creating a government, rationalizing government involvement in markets, and listening to the people.

African agriculture, especially small farms, have not had it easy over the past few years. Droughts, pests, floods, and local conflict have exacerbated challenges for many food producers. This is why insurtech startup Pula is working to provide small farmers with insurance to help manage the implications of climate change and other environmental uncertainties. The startup begins the farming season by sending representatives to farms to gauge the potential yield of the season. Pula then sends this estimate to insurance companies to generate a policy offer. According to Pula, the initiative has been so successful because in every African country they have worked in, there are insurance companies willing to support their initiative.

Fintech is one of the buzziest trends in financial services right now, and no financial institution wants to be left behind. But with seemingly boundless opportunities, how do you know which fintech partnerships make sense for your FI? Here are seven tips for making sure your fintech activities align with your business strategy: Start with a clearly defined business strategy. Strategy, not technology, should drive your fintech decisions. Before considering any fintech partnerships, make sure you have a clearly defined and communicated business strategy that aligns with your FI’s objectives. Don’t get on board with a promising technology and then build a strategy around it. Don’t blindly jump into opportunities that fall in your lap—seek out partnerships that will support your goals. Don’t just sign on for a fintech partnership because it sounds cool. Only experiment with fintech if you have a goal and purpose in mind. Think about what you’re trying to accomplish. Don’t spread your focus too thinly. Not every new initiative needs to have ties to a fintech partnership. Only experiment in areas that are important to your business. Use your limited resources to explore fintech that can make a significant contribution to your FI. Experimenting with fintech partnerships that do nothing to drive bottom-line results may not be a good use of time and effort.

A lot of times an FI will direct IT staff to develop fintech partnerships. While IT has a lot of insight to offer, they don’t have all the information to drive the decision. Business and IT need to work together to find and deploy fintech partnerships that make sense. It shouldn’t be a strictly business or tech initiative.

Fintech is one of the buzziest trends in financial services right now, and no financial institution wants to be left behind. But with seemingly boundless opportunities, how do you know which fintech partnerships make sense for your FI? Here are seven tips for making sure your fintech activities align with your business strategy: Start with a clearly defined business strategy. Strategy, not technology, should drive your fintech decisions. Before considering any fintech partnerships, make sure you have a clearly defined and communicated business strategy that aligns with your FI’s objectives. Don’t get on board with a promising technology and then build a strategy around it. Don’t blindly jump into opportunities that fall in your lap—seek out partnerships that will support your goals. Don’t just sign on for a fintech partnership because it sounds cool. Only experiment with fintech if you have a goal and purpose in mind. Think about what you’re trying to accomplish. Don’t spread your focus too thinly. Not every new initiative needs to have ties to a fintech partnership. Only experiment in areas that are important to your business. Use your limited resources to explore fintech that can make a significant contribution to your FI. Experimenting with fintech partnerships that do nothing to drive bottom-line results may not be a good use of time and effort.

Fawry now supports millions of transactions daily for consumers and business through more than 90,000 locations (including groceries, pharmacies, stationaries and post offices), as well as through multiple alternative channels, including online, ATMs, and mobile wallets. The company’s client base and service offerings continue to expand, leading to rapid data growth. Abbas comments: "Our data has doubled in just the last eight months, and we expect it to grow even faster in the years to come.”

The technology offers data compression and deduplication features that enable Fawry to boost utilization of storage resources. Abbas adds: “IBM FlashSystem A9000R offers much greater performance than our previous storage platform, meaning that we get both optimized data economics and short response times. We were able to achieve a seamless migration to the new platform with zero downtime.”

Each day, Fawry processes 2 million financial transactions, giving Egyptians an easy, secure payment alternative to the complex, time-consuming procedures that are the norm. To help grow customer satisfaction and speed the roll-out of new services, Fawry deployed IBM® Storage, IBM Db2® and Oracle database on IBM Power Systems™ solutions.

Latest figures put the value of the cryptocurrency market at almost $240bn in 2019, nearly double the 2018 figure of $128bn. Could this mean that the global crypto market is starting to move into the mainstream? Significantly, the sector is enjoying rapid growth globally, with the UK, Nigeria, Australia, Canada, Mexico and India all experiencing a recent surge in users. Crypto is also starting to attract interest from institutional investors, which see it as possible insurance against the global rise in quantitative easing.

The big banking brands have shown little interest in cryptocurrency to date. In part, this is due to their general aversion to high levels of risk and an institutionalised culture ill suited to digital change and innovation – but there is also a legitimate fear that they will fall foul of financial regulators. 

It stands to reason that cryptocurrency exchanges are well positioned and strongly motivated to exploit the narrowing gap between crypto and fiat – because they have first-move advantage. Having already built huge cash reserves and crypto-familiar customer bases, it would be relatively straightforward technically for them to add on banking services. 

Launched by Safaricom, Kenya's leading mobile provider, M-Pesa is a mobile payment service that has brought the enjoyment and convenience of mobile payment to people. In its ten years of growth, M-Pesa has expanded from a person-to-person money transfer service to a payments service that people can use to pay for shopping, medical care, education, and many other things. It has become a household brand name in Kenya and one of the most successful examples of a mobile payment service in the world.