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An alternative to bank card-based transactions, direct carrier and direct wallet billing offered by TPAY MOBILE allows users to make purchases by charging payments to their mobile phone carrier bills or pre-paid airtime balance, as well as wallet stored value. Such cashless payments have become even more popular with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic as consumers increase their digital spending while facing restrictions on leaving their homes.

M-Pesa, the mobile money service success story that began in Kenya in 2007 is continuing its march, this time into the surprising location of Romania, raising the questions, what will the product look like in this new European market and how will it fare. At the end of last month Vodafone, the operator behind the new service and one of Romania’s largest telcos, began operations using the country’s 300 Vodafone Romania stores, participating retail outlets, and authorized agents.

“We have identified an opportunity for effective global collaboration to do our part in enhancing financial inclusion for migrants living in South Africa. Through this partnership, we have been able to expand our reach globally, sparing our customers the hassle to travel long distances to collect their money as we now leverage off Western Union’s vast network of retail agents, bank account and wallet payout capabilities,”

The Mastercard Foundation Fund for Rural Prosperity (FRP) is investing $2.8 million in three companies from Burundi, Malawi, and Uganda to support projects that expand financial inclusion in rural Africa.

The three companies, Prothem Usine, Pula Advisors, and Enviu BV, were selected from among 195 firms that submitted applications to the third phase of the Fund’s 2017/2018 rolling competition. This competition is an effort to find and support scalable financial products and services for rural areas of Africa.

Ismail Ahmed, founder and CEO at WorldRemit, states that WorldRemit customers can send money with just a few taps on their smartphone and that the new cash pick up service in Algeria enables people in the diaspora to send money to be collected as cash at financial brands back home. WorldRemit customers currently send over 500,000 transfers every month

Digital money transfer service WorldRemit has launched new cash pick up services in Algeria. With the WorldRemit app or website, people in more than 50 countries can send instant money transfers to more than 125 destinations. WorldRemit customers can now send money to be collected as cash from any branch of Trust Bank Algeria.

Digital money transfer service WorldRemit has launched new cash pick up services in Algeria.

“According to the World Bank, over 80% of the Malawian population live in rural areas. Our new partnership offers recipients a variety of convenient cash pickup locations across the country, and our digital model drives down the cost of remittances as senders do not have to visit a traditional offline money 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.

What Andy Jury is referring to is the backstory behind Mukuru.  “Our founders were in this same boat,” he adds, “and what started out as a desire to iron out personal wrinkles, in getting money home to their friends and family, morphed into a realisation that there was a massive business opportunity if we could build a simple, secure, rapid means of affordably being able to send money.”  A remittances-led financial services company that was brought to life to empower financially under-serviced migrants, Mukuru has become renowned as the go-to platform to send money in a convenient, safe and affordable manner across Africa.  “We wanted to produce a transformative solution that was simple to use and accessible to anyone with a mobile device,” Jury, the company’s Group CEO, adds. “It required us to walk in our customers’ shoes, understand the pain points they had with remitting money home and build a solution that addressed these challenges.”  And this is exactly what the company has spent the past decade doing.

“We’ve attempted to stay true to this approach as our business has grown, expanded and evolved – if we continue to obsess about trying to understand what customers really need and build solutions to address these requirements, then we’ll be well placed to walk alongside our customer base as their needs evolve.”  Following this philosophy, Mukuru has developed a remittance portfolio that is characterised by a high degree of customer loyalty, trust and repeat business – features that have enabled the company to reach a total 25 million transactions, a figure recorded in late 2018.   

What Andy Jury is referring to is the backstory behind Mukuru.  “Our founders were in this same boat,” he adds, “and what started out as a desire to iron out personal wrinkles, in getting money home to their friends and family, morphed into a realisation that there was a massive business opportunity if we could build a simple, secure, rapid means of affordably being able to send money.”  A remittances-led financial services company that was brought to life to empower financially under-serviced migrants, Mukuru has become renowned as the go-to platform to send money in a convenient, safe and affordable manner across Africa.  “We wanted to produce a transformative solution that was simple to use and accessible to anyone with a mobile device,” Jury, the company’s Group CEO, adds. “It required us to walk in our customers’ shoes, understand the pain points they had with remitting money home and build a solution that addressed these challenges.”  And this is exactly what the company has spent the past decade doing.

WorldCover began with pilot programs in several African countries. Four years on, it has sold drought insurance to about 30,000 customers. Its largest customer base is in Ghana, and it recently expanded into Kenya. But the firm has also encountered some of the same market barriers that have hampered other African microinsurance programs.

WorldCover began with pilot programs in several African countries. Four years on, it has sold drought insurance to about 30,000 customers. Its largest customer base is in Ghana, and it recently expanded into Kenya. But the firm has also encountered some of the same market barriers that have hampered other African microinsurance programs.

M-Pesa is a branchless banking service; M-Pesa customers can deposit and withdraw money from a network of agents that includes airtime resellers and retail outlets acting as banking agents.

Founded by Peris Bosire and Rita Kimani, FarmDrive delivers productive digital loans and lay away savings products to smallholder farmers in Kenya, helping them grow their incomes and resilience.

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.

Vigor Crypto Labs set up to formalize the testing of the trading strategies in preparation for B2B commercialization WASHINGTON, DC, Feb. 11, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NewMediaWire -- Xalles Holdings Inc. (OTC: XALL), a fintech holding company providing technology and financial services solutions, announces strategic initiatives to capitalize on the growing digital asset and cryptocurrency market. 

UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) is pleased to announce that JUMO has won their Sprint4Women Design Competition for women’s financial inclusion in Zambia. JUMO was one of three finalists competing for a grant to roll-out digital financial services (DFS) solutions for the rural women of Zambia, alongside Fenix Zambia and Hobbiton Investments.

Founded in late 2016 by Ahmed Wadi, MoneyFellows has digitized the concept of money circles (ROSCAs) which are commonly known as gam’eya in Egypt and other Arab countries, through its online platform.

Egypt's MoneyFellows raises $4 million Series A to expand its digital money circles platform to Africa

MoneyFellows with its mobile-based platform has digitized this entire process with a scoring model that compliments offline model, making it more scalable, safe, and efficient. In a statement, the Egyptian fintech said that it currently has over 150,000 active users that are verified by a user assessment algorithm. It also works with different corporates in Egypt, enabling their employees to participate in the money circles for saving money. 

The country has seen skyrocketing mobile penetration rates, with subscriptions surpassing the total population amount by 12%, and FinTech innovations have followed. For example, the telecommunications giant Safaricom, which contributes 5% of the county’s GDP, led the push in 2007 with its M-Pesa money transfer service, which functions much like a limited mobile bank but without the need for an Internet connection. M-Pesa combines Safaricom’s mobile infrastructure with an agent model; Safaricom stores their balance and customers can go to one of 110,000 agents throughout the country to conduct transactions in person. The whole system runs on technology similar to text messaging, and has expanded to seven countries.

AgroCenta's innovation focuses on the post harvest value chain. The suite of services within AgroCenta provides an end-to-end solution that ensures that it provides a win-win situation for the smallholder farmer and all active players in the value chain. If a smallholder farmer wants to know the latest market price of maize in the nearest market to enable him price competitively, he uses AgroInfo to request for information via SMS and Voice solutions. After the farmers has made a decision on how much to sell, the farmer's commodity information are uploaded onto the AgroTrade platform to connect him to buyers. When a trade agreement is reached between the farmer and a buyer, the farmer requests for TruckR, which is the truck delivery service component of AgroCenta, in real time using mobile phone. After the commodities are sold to the buyer, the farmer is paid via the AgroPay solution, which is the financial inclusion platform within AgroCenta

AgroCenta targets about 10 million smallholder farmers in Sub Saharan Africa within the next 5 years to help them trade fairly. Over 90% of these smallholder farmers live under $1 and are not able to make enough money from sales proceed to take care of their families and re-invest a percentage of the money raised back into their farms.

AgroCenta's value proposition lies in the advantage of providing the last mile market access for smallholder farmers in the staple food value chain through extensive collaboration with many partners who play an active role in the value chain.

STARTUP WATCH- E-commerce company Capiter plans to invest EGP 500 mn next year to expand its geographical presence and the network of its SME clients, CEO and founding partner Mahmoud Nouh said, according to Al Mal. The Cairo-based company, which was founded in May 2019, operates an app that connects small and medium companies to suppliers.

FarmDrive is a Kenyan ¬based social enterprise that is unlocking access to financial services for over 50 million smallholder farmers in Africa. Using simple mobile phone technology, alternative data sets, and sophisticated data analytics, FarmDrive is closing the critical information gap that keeps smallholder farmers from getting loans that would allow them to grow and diversify their businesses. Potentially creditworthy smallholder farmers are often denied loans because they lack the traditional credit profiles that lenders rely on to evaluate borrowers.FarmDrive bridges the funding gap between smallholder farmers and financial institutions in two ways. The first step is to bring together multiple streams of data to create yield-predictive agronomic algorithms specific to each farming vertical and geographical region. T hese streams of data can be classified into three categories: 1. Agronomic Data: crop portfolio, soil health, drainage, weeds, pests, etc. 2. Remote Sensing Data: vegetation, weather conditions, climate trends, etc. 3. Market Data: offtake security, price trends, etc. FarmDrive then creates credit profiles for farmers by combining the agronomic algorithm with behavioral data. The behavioral data is obtained from farmers through a simple SMS/Android mobile phone application. With this application, Farmers can track their revenues and expenses, and also send demographic information to FarmDrive.