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ghtazi

Seven ways for financial institutions to react to financial-technology companies | McKi... - 0 views

  • 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.
  • As we counsel the leaders of incumbent financial institutions, we often turn to seven potential reactions they can consider. Leaders can seek to pursue a combination of      these options: Buy a fintech. Strategic through-cycle M&A can be a powerful driver of growth even as valuations remain high, particularly among the most successful and largest fintech companies. Whether incumbents purchase a company for its traction (customer base, loan book), technology (user experience, core system, advanced data capability), or talent (engineering, product management, executive leadership), we frequently find that success depends on their developing strength in post-acquisition integration. Partner with a fintech. A carefully designed partnership can enable faster time to market and cost-efficient implementation, with the ultimate goal of enable enabling bottom-line business impact from accessing new customers or improving back-office processes. Invest in fintechs. Investing in fintech companies is frequently a way to learn more about the space and to hedge some o
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  • 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.
    • samiatazi
       
      New competitors and competitive challenges are seen also in areas once thought to be protected. The most recent sectors to see innovation are wealth and asset management, wholesale finance, financial markets, taxation and risk. Fintechs illustrate the gaps of digital customer interfaces and organizational performance of incumbent financial institutions. In order to deal with the Fintech challenge, incumbents can attempt to follow a mix of seven alternatives.
  • 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.
    • ghtazi
       
      what we can say is that even in the fintech world there is harsh competition, what once started as a disruption in the payments space has now been extended to every corner of finance. even the safest areas see new entrants and competitiveness. But even with all the pressure that they may encounter Fintechs always finds a way to redefine customer expectations and continue to create new business models.
samielbaqqali

A new era of Fintech with customer engagement - 0 views

  • One of the major challenges faced by financial companies are cyber threats, thus making it key motive to strengthen payment gateway to safeguard customer data and transaction process.
    • samielbaqqali
       
      Fawry should be careful with the cyber threats,as all its business is based on computers and network.
aminej

Ghana maintains score on Corruption Perception Index | ARAP-Ghana - 0 views

  • The 2019 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) was released worldwide on 23 January 2020, scoring and ranking 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of corruption.  The Index put together by Transparency International ranks countries annually by their perceived levels of corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys.
    • aminej
       
      The corruption index ranks Ghana 75th worldwide, doing better than 37 african countries but less than 9 others. Still corruption can be considered as a threat for our company since it can affect the political framework in which our company operates
  • The index foresees a range between zero (highly corrupt) and 100 (very clean), and based on these points, it ranks countries from the best performing to the worst-performing.  Since CPI is a perception index, no country will ever achieve a perfect score.  
aminej

Promising future for Islamic banking in Ghana | Ghana 2015 | Oxford Business Group - 0 views

  • In Ghana there is currently just one sharia-compliant financial institution – Ghana Islamic Microfinance, which began as an NGO – though there is significant scope for growth. Part of this is due to the country’s demographic make-up. Although Muslims are far from the only potential client base for IFS, as evidenced by the rollout of Islamic financing instruments in countries like the UK and Japan, sharia-compliant products could prove attractive for the roughly 17.6% of Ghana’s population that identifies as Muslim, according to the 2010 census.
    • aminej
       
      The fact that 17.1% of Muslims in Ghana won't be able to invest in our applications is a big threat but we have thought that if we included shariah compliand products such as sukuk we could include this marginalized part of the country and improve their situations
aminej

Average Salary in Ghana 2021 - The Complete Guide - 0 views

  • A person working in Ghana typically earns around 5,070 GHS per month. Salaries range from 1,280 GHS (lowest average) to 22,600 GHS (highest average, actual maximum salary is higher).
    • aminej
       
      Unfortunately, The mean salary in Ghana are really low so it can be considered as a threat for people who would like to use our app but cannot due to low salaries that only permit them to eat and pay their housing.
sawsanenn

Frontiers | FinTech: A New Hedge for a Financial Re-intermediation. Strategy and Risk P... - 0 views

  • FinTechs and the Value Chains in the Financial IndustryIt is beneficial to remember how things worked before and after FinTechs and TechFins or big techs in the financial industry.Banking models are shifting significantly from a pipeline, vertical, paradigm, to modular solutions that pave the way to new banking paradigms that entail higher levels of openness toward third parties and a growing number of modular services bundled together.Value is created in platforms through economies of scope in production and innovation (Gawer, 2014). In order for platforms to work, adoption and network effects are essential. Models can go to mere compliance with the prescriptions of openness of PSD2, to the inclusion of new services, the opening of the banking core and data, and the aggregation of those within a platform experience. In particular, we assist both to the evolution of a Bank-as-a-Platform model and a tech-platform-driven model supporting banking and financial intermediation, which both constitute a new interesting field of analysis.Since the wave of digital transformation started entering the financial industr
  • , banking-as-a-business has started moving from a product/service perspective to more contextual solutions where providers are customer needs-driven. This is because customer-driven companies outperform the shareholder-driven ones, and this requires an outside-in approach.Having said that, it is beneficial to remember that digital transformation implies four main categories of innovation (product, process, organizational and business model) (Omarini, 2019, p. 340); all of them require rediscovering that a new strategy paradigm exists. This regards the concept of co-creation, and because of this no single firm can unilaterally carry out a process of continuous experimentation, risk reduction, time compression, and minimizing investment while maximizing market impact. Co-creation requires access to resources from extended networks (suppliers, partners, and consumer communities).Under these new market conditions, FinTechs have become an important piece of a bigger puzzle, each one in its own area of business (payment, lending, etc.), while at the beg
  • inning most of them started as mono-business companies. Only a few of them may become leaders in the market. On the one hand, there are those that make their strategy become international, and on the other, there are FinTechs which enlarge their services-scopes. However, the majority of them will become part of ecosystems where the direction could swing from banks to tech companies or to FinTechs as well, able to manage the network by developing kinds of conglomerate-as-a-service.Another interesting point to outline regards this recent period where all of us have experienced lockdowns around the world, and some effects have also impacted FinTechs as well. The valuations of most unicorns have crashed overnight, while on the FinTechs side there are different situations. Some of them have experienced a dramatic reduction in their
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  • strategy development process, especially when the various units and individuals in the network must collectively execute that strategy. The key issue is this: balancing act between collaborating and competing is delicate and crucial” (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004, p. 197).If co-creation is fundamental to the industry, this needs to leverage on a wider customer perspective that requires introducing the idea of developing ecosystems where the customer is truly free to move and choose the best deal in more competitive markets able to let consumers' ability to make informed decisions against any possible market concentrations among market providers.A business ecosystem (Moore, 1996) reflects the new paradigm of competition in a better way. Traditional management models aimed at gaining competitive advantage, such as vertical or horizontal integration, economies of scale and scope, are not effective anymore. The value of today's companies is determined by the size of its ecosystem (Tewari, 2014). Business ecosystems consist in crossovers of a variety of industries, of which companies cooperate and embrace open innovation to satisfy new customers' needs an
    • samiatazi
       
      Digital transformation implies four main categories of innovation: product, process, organizational and business model. FinTechs have become a significant piece of a greater riddle, every one in its own zone of business. The victors are those that have sufficient liquidity and money to purchase great innovation. This is particularly valid for installments that will be progressively contactless. Individuals costs and per-client commitment edge are key elements, and important markers. The more wellsprings of incomes an organization holds, the better it is for it to be a FinTech.
  • sons can be learnt from difficult times especially due to external factors such as the following:- People costs and per-customer contribution margin are key factors, and valuable indicators. They are valuable for incumbents too. When staff costs rise, then this becomes a burden if growth is not going to move on. Then, if we move on the per-customer contribution margin (revenue, minus variable costs including credit losses), then this makes a FinTech earn more money per bank account than the cost of running those bank accounts.- One more point has to do with the way a FinTech makes its revenues per customer, and net income is the figure to look out for here. This means that the more sources of revenues a company holds, the better it is for it. If we think of some of the best-known FinTechs, they gather their net income from interchange fees, ATM withdrawals, which can diminish during the pandemic, but gathering revenues from other sources such as lending, investing, or again from referring customers to third-party services, and earning commissions from these referrals.Under this oncoming market structure configuration, a focus on control and ownership of resources is giving way to the importance of accessing and leveraging resources through unique ways of collaboration. “The co-creation process also challenges the assumption that only the firm's aspirations matter. (…) Every participant in the experience network collaborates in value creation and competes in value extraction. This result in constant tension in the
  • evaluation, others were quite lucky and suffered less.There are many and different feelings on the way FinTechs will exit this situation, which as far as we understand has overall accelerated some strategic choices.First of all, there are many and different FinTechs in the market. What is critical is to look at the fundamentals of the business. All of them are about answering what society is going to look like in the future (attitudes, behaviors, habits, etc.), so that if we no longer need to go to retail stores anymore, why do we need some services based on this situation? This, again, underlines that banking is a people business (Omarini, 2015) and this requires a business to be resilient to become adaptive to consumer changes or moves into a different market where you can still apply the service because the society is not yet ready to shift somewhere else, which means the same business in different markets. Just think of the ongoing situation where the recent wave of people is rethinking and restructuring their finances, so that they have decided to switch rates to digital banks. In this scenario, the winners are those that have enough liquidity—or better still cash-rich—to buy good technology and invest in new directions, also taking the opportunity to use the pandemic to its advantage. This is especially true for payments that are going to be increasingly contactless. However, some more les
  • One more point has to do with the way a FinTech makes its revenues per customer, and net income is the figure to look out for here. This means that the more sources of revenues a company holds, the better it is for it. If we think of some of the best-known FinTechs, they gather their net income from interchange fees, ATM withdrawals, which can diminish during the pandemic, but gathering revenues from other sources such as lending, investing, or again from referring customers to third-party services, and earning commissions from these referrals.
    • hichamachir
       
      Pula can benefit so much from expanding its revenues streams. It lets the customers use the product or service in different ways which can't make them feel lazy to use a specific way.
  • The emergence of new technologies and players, along with a favorable regulatory framework (PSD2 Directive), is changing the banking industry. FinTechs and TechFins have allowed the introduction of new services and changed the way customers interact to satisfy their financial needs. The FinTech landscape is constantly evolving in the market. Different business value propositions are entering the financial services industry, moving from increasing the user's experience to developing a time to market framework for banks to innovate products, processes, and channels, increasing the cost efficiency and looking for a “partnering on order” to lighten the regulatory burdens for banks. The many businesses of banks are changing their value chains, and banks' business models should do the same accordingly. Strategists could no longer take their value chains as a given; choices have to be made on what needs to be protected and maintained, what abandoned and the new on coming to make banks evolve and become more resilient in doing their job. Banking is shifting significantly from a pipeline, vertical paradigm, to open banking business models where open innovation, modularity, and ecosystem-based bank's business model may become the ongoing mainstream and paradigm to follow and develop. Opportunities and threats for banks are many and new ones to re-gaining their role in the market throughout a re-intermediation process.
    • ghtazi
       
      FinTechs and TechFins have enabled new services to be launched and changed the way clients communicate to meet their financial needs. In the industry, the FinTech landscape is continuously changing.
  • They have brought to the traditional banking industry a wave of competition and broken pipeline value chains, unbundling them into different modules of products or services, which may be combined among themselves. These companies on the one hand and the BigTechs (Google, Facebook, Apple, Samsung, Alibaba, etc.) on the other have been forcing the industry to change, transform, and evolve in a set of new financial intermediation directions. Use of data and customer experience are both FinTechs' major assets and threats as well. On the one hand, they please the customers as individuals and introduce the paradigm of contextual banking. On the other, the two selling points are threatening both the incumbent players and regulators in different ways. For banks, it is even more urgent to react actively because their “no fee zone” is expanding, due to new regulations from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureaus (CFPB) and similar entities in different countries.
    • sawsanenn
       
      Since the digitalization wave entered the banking industry, financial institutions has begun to move from a product/service standpoint to more semantic alternatives where suppliers are pushed by customer needs. This is because the customer-driven firms outclass the investor ones, and this necessitates an outside strategy.
aminej

Ghana Interest Rate - Ghana Economy Forecast & Outlook - 0 views

  • At its 26–29 January meeting, the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of Ghana decided to keep the policy rate steady at 14.50%, marking the fifth consecutive hold. The decision reflected the Bank’s assessment that despite inflation accelerating recently, it expects it to return to target in the second quarter of this year. Inflation jumped to 10.4% in December 2020 (November: 9.8%) as a result of quicker food inflation, thus landing above the Bank’s target range of 6.0%–10.0%. Although short-term risks to inflation are also emerging from fiscal expansion and rising oil prices, they remain broadly contained according to the Bank, enabling it to maintain its accommodative stance.
    • aminej
       
      The economic factors in Ghana are a little bit worrying since inflation is really high (10.4%), interest rates at 14.50%. It shows that the Ghanean economic is really volatile and can affect demand and competitivity within the country if not maintained controlled
mbellakbail69

Why South African brands really should adopt an omni-channel model - Ventureburn - 0 views

  • These inconsistent experiences frustrate consumers, who see each brand as a single entity. They don’t know or care that there are different teams putting together the advertising, working in the call centre, and looking after the mobile app. They want a consistent experience from each of these touchpoints. Increasingly, they demand a seamless and connected experience that uses the mobile phone as the hub of communication. Financial firms, especially, face competitive threats from digital disruptors such as Google, PayPal, Apple, and South Africa’s Snapscan.
  • Unlike a multi-channel approach, mobile should not be viewed as a silo by a brand that is committed to omni-channel experiences. With a sound mobile strategy integrated into an omni-channel approach, brands can use push messages effectively within their apps to send personalised messages to customers if they have their permission.
tahaemsd

10X Focus: MoneyFellows - FinTech startup digitising a traditional practice | SME10X - 0 views

  • by taking the process online, MoneyFellows has turned the biggest threat to trust — movability of people — into a strength; as through the digital platform they are easily able to scale their services.
    • tahaemsd
       
      to bring back trust and efficiency MoneyFellow has taken this concept online.thereby instilling trust and accountability, making lending safer and more efficient
tahaemsd

How Can Insurance Help Smallholder Farmers? | by Maelis Carraro | Finance for Life | Me... - 0 views

  • Robert is a father of four and lives in the rural areas at the outskirts of Tamale, in northern Ghana. He lives off his one hectare of land where he grows maize and groundnuts. He sells part of it to the local market and eats the rest with his family. Like many of the 475 million smallholder farmers around the world, he faces constant threats of droughts or other weather hazards that can destroy his family’s main source of subsistence: Crops. Ninety percent of farmers in Africa have no access to crop insurance or other safety net.
  • WorldCover addresses this problem by providing farmers with simple and affordable microinsurance policies, insuring their crops against the risk of drought. Microinsurance and farmers receive rapid payout in cases of drought during the crop growth period. WorldCover ran a full pilot project in 2015 among Rice and Sorghum farmers and signed up a significant number of farmers, with many more committed.
  •  
    We understand from this article that there is a real struggle for crop farmers in Africa when it comes to droughts or other weather hazards. World Cover has come up with a solution for these farmers by providing them micro insurance that is very cheap and that could be bought and used with their mobile phone.
kenza_abdelhaq

Lumkani - 0 views

  • Lumkani, a Johannesburg-based startup that leverages proprietary hardware and a tech-enabled agent network to provide customers living in informal settlements within South Africa with insurance products that protect against loss of life, shelter, and assets in the case of a home fire. Lumkani, which means ‘be careful’ in Xhosa, originally began as a hardware company, deploying its first fire detector in late 2014. Within the first 18 months, they were able to prove that their technology “in 73 percent of cases was able to reduce the spreading of fires [beyond] the first home.” But it was not enough just to alert the community and stop the spreading of fires.
    • kenza_abdelhaq
       
      Starting off as a hardware company that helped low-income families and informal settlements, Lumkani quickly shifted to the new technologies and partnered up with the insurance company Hollard to not only detect fire but to have access to fire insurance.
  • Destructive fires are a regular, and potentially devastating, occurrence for the approximately 10 million South Africans that live in informal settlement communities. These townships are particularly susceptible to the threat of fires due to the use of flammable building materials, the ubiquity of open flame fires, limited space between dwellings, and a lack of road infrastructure for adequate emergency response.
    • kenzabenessalah
       
      Such devices are a must have in regions where fires are regular. It was smart to present such a device in South Africa because almost 10 million South Africans are affected by such tragic events.
  • With that problem in mind, Lumkani, partnered with Hollard, a South African-based insurance company, to develop the world’s first hardware-enabled fire insurance specifically designed for informal settlements. To serve clients that had been ignored by traditional financial service providers previously, the company has created an efficient, engaging, and easy to manage experience for its low-income customers.
    • kenza_abdelhaq
       
      Lumkani developed hardware-enabled fire insurance to detect fires in informal settlements and partnered up with the insurance company Hollard to provide this segment with solutions and experience that was not made available to them by traditional financial service providers.
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