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Mobile money transfer platform Mpesa has been voted Kenya’s leading superbrand.In a survey carried out by top urban consumers and undertaken by Kantar TNS in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu, leading telecommunications firm Safaricom, which owns the MPESA brand, came in second.It is the fourth year on the trot that MPESA has won this accolade, coming at a time the Covid-19 pandemic has hit the country’s economy.

AgroCenta brings the shareholders in Ghana’s agricultural value chain under one umbrella. Focusing on the producers, rural smallholder farmers, the company has developed a web and mobile platform that provides rural farmers with a suite of services to empower them to sell their crops at fair-market prices. AgroCenta’s platform, which is includes SMS functionality, provides the following services: 1) AgroInfo: real-time commodity pricing information; 2) TruckR: an on-demand logistics solution; 3) AgroTrade: a market platform to offer crops for sale; and 4) AgroPay: a mobile-money based payments service. The company markets its platform leveraging an intimate knowledge of the African cultural context and recruiting and technologically empowering village chiefs to act as advocates or agents for the platform.

Applications were submitted by companies across the region. The 10 finalists include: Artis Technologies, LLC – modern financing made simple through an embedded financial services platform for digital lending and real-time payments EnrichHER – offers funders the best selection of vetted investment opportunities in companies that have women in leadership roles, while cultivating a thriving ecosystem of New Majority businesses Ethiopay – safe and convenient way to pay loved ones’ bills from anywhere in the world Finosec – IT and cybersecurity management platform for the banking industry Griffin Technologies – customer intelligence platform that provides banks modern day context on new and existing customers Immediate – helps businesses recruit, engage, and retain employees by providing a financial wellness solution that delivers on-demand access to earned pay InvestGuard – technology-enabled exchange for independent PE sponsors Lendsmart AI – AI-enabled technology platform transforming the homebuying process Ryze – Bitcoin-first financial institution, starting with the most powerful way to save and accumulate Bitcoin VIVA Finance – improving employees’ financial well-being through an affordable lending program and financial education

At the conclusion of the program, the startups will present to a panel of investors during Fintech South’s Investor Preview event on Monday, Oct. 5. The top three companies will hit the virtual conference’s main stage for a chance to win $25,000.

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.

Microfinance practices were originally developed in offline contexts. Modern microfinance practices were based on development models for the financial and social empowerment of the poorest of poor in developing countries. Several of these practices drew from existing traditions of money lending within local communities that were reformed to be in sync with rural development and the empowerment of the underprivileged individual. In present ‘postmodern’ times, microfinance providers are using online tools in the hopes of broadening the reach and extending the advantages provided by such a model of micro-lending and micro-borrowing. In this article, we examine an online peer-to-peer lending and borrowing website, Kiva.org, which uses online social networking tools in microfinance. The study is thus a close look at the actual content of the website with a view to understanding the representational practices of online space through Internet mediated microfinance.

(Agence Ecofin) - Malgré la crise sanitaire, la demande en produits agricoles reste importante au Ghana. Dans ce contexte, la start-up Agrocenta a fait le pari de financer et trouver des débouchés à ces agriculteurs qui n’aspirent qu’à produire davantage pour satisfaire la demande. Agrocenta, une start-up ghanéenne fondée en 2015 dans le but de faciliter l’accès aux marchés et aux financements a bénéficié d’un appui financier de 790 000 $ des fondations Shell et Rabobank, de la firme d’investissement AV Ventures dédiée aux entreprises agroalimentaires ouest-africaines et du Bureau des affaires étrangères du Commonwealth.

Mobile phones, which have been adopted faster than any other technology in human history, are the visible expressions of a technology-oriented consumer (Jack and Suri, 2010). Although this image is mainly associated with the iPhone in Asian, European, or North American contexts, the spread of mobile phone technology has been even faster and successful in Africa.

This is a good example of a service whose time had come and whose implementation occurred in the right context.

From a larger context, Eunice Maina, the CEO of Bismart Insurance in Kenya, associated the low penetration of insurance in the east African country to the traditional nature of insurance practiced in Kenya.  She asserted that the largest economy in east Africa practices informal insurance resulting in the low penetration of the market.“Kenya practices informal insurance in the form of crowdfunding and that has affected the penetration rate,” she said. However, Maina is of the view that rather than adopting the European pattern, traditional insurance should be developed without having to deviate from the African model. She, therefore, solicited for the use of African perspective in developing insurance in the region as techniques to tackle cultural and religious barriers in the insurance industry.

Focus on your customers’ pain pointsSenior Solution clearly identified many of its customers’ pain points and tweaked its offering to help customers overcome them. Among the difficulties customers faced were a fragmented and large number of suppliers. This lack of integration created compliance problems and compatibility issues due to the company having multiple platforms. Also, no end to end solution existed. Different systems existed for bonds, equities, foreign exchange, front and back office, and more. In addition there were specificities from the Brazilian context that complicated dealings with banks such as a high level of inflation: traditional systems cannot handle so many digits, for example. And, previously there were complex methods for computing interest rates on interbank loans. All of these issues added up to be a hassle for customers who had to deal with them manually before Senior Solution introduced a way to ease the process.

In order to prevent fraudulent transactions, Paga has put certain measures in place to protect its users. A user logging into an unrecognized device, for example, will have to answer a couple of security questions before proceeding. Again, every transaction using Paga has to be finalized with a personal PIN known only to the user.