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Asia’s fintech scene is poised to get a little larger after Jumo, a company that offers loans to the unbanked in Africa, revealed plans to expand into the continent. To get the ball rolling, Jumo has opened an office in Singapore to lead the way and landed a massive $52 million investment led by banking giant Goldman Sachs to fuel the growth.

Asia’s fintech scene is poised to get a little larger after Jumo, a company that offers loans to the unbanked in Africa, revealed plans to expand into the continent. To get the ball rolling, Jumo has opened an office in Singapore to lead the way and landed a massive $52 million investment led by banking giant Goldman Sachs to fuel the growth.

Kiva receives a broad range of support from a diverse set of corporations and foundations. From discounted services and free software, to grants and financial backing, Kiva is grateful for each partner that helps us achieve our mission of expanding financial access to help underserved communities thrive. (Please note that the corporations and foundations listed have made contributions of either grants, loan funds, equipment or services in the last 30 months.)

You can now get electricity when you need it then later pay later! Okoa Stima allows you to borrow any amount based on your pre-determined credit limit. This limit is based on your historical relationship with Kenya Power. The loan comes at a facility fee of 10% and is payable in 7 days. Your M-PESA account will be deducted with amount of top plus facility fee so there is no delay. You will be able to register up to 3 meters and tokens purchased/Bill paid cannot be used on another meter except the 3 you have registered. To take advantage of this great service just dial *885# from your mobile phone.

ezoMoney provides a digital solution to informal savings schemes, allowing savings groups and individuals via their digital savings platform. BezoMoney has a wallet for each of the individuals who save with them. The digital savings platform provides access to loans and helps those saving with them create a comprehensive savings history to ensure transparency.  Bezo Money also provides investments, investment payment options, insurance, group purchase, and pensions services.

Undoubtedly, Ghana’s drive towards a cashless economy cannot be achieved without Financial Technology — FinTech. We’ve been pushed to an era where most people use mobile money services in the country, and have seen the birth of FinTech companies who render financial services and also provide foreign remittance services from countries across the world.

This is why the Vodacom-Safaricom duo has created a joint venture with full powers to make M-Pesa a “super-app” to provide for various needs such as booking taxis, making various appointments or paying for various services by mobile phone.

Safaricom launched new services as early as 2013, with M-Shwari, Fuliza and KCB M-Pesa came later to provide savings and micro-loans. By 2019, these “apps within apps” will account for two-thirds of M-Pesa’s revenues (84.4 billion shillings in total). “Remittances are still performing well and are up 14.6 per cent over the previous year,” said Sateesh Kamath, Safaricom’s chief financial officer.

We’re here to give you the best home buying experience through convenience, transparency and choice…while you make the most important purchase of your life- buying your home.

South Africa-based financial technology firm JUMO plans to expand in high-growth Asian markets after securing the backing of Goldman Sachs GS.N in an equity funding round, the company's chief executive said.

Since its founding in 2014, JUMO, which helps individuals and small businesses access savings and credit products through their mobile devices, has mainly focused on Africa where the adoption of mobile money has transformed the banking landscape.

JUMO uses behavioural data such as mobile telephone use to help financial services providers and mobile network operators assess lending risk and tailor financial products to those living in developing countries where credit information is scarce.

“The digital nature of the product can be seen as exacerbating the usual challenges of ICT illiteracy. However, FarmDrive presents the record-keeping platform in different languages  – it’s now available in English and Kiswahili – via a simple SMS to increase the uptake of record-keeping among rural farmers. So farmers don’t have to have a smartphone,” Bosire says.“It also emerged during our pilot that farmers feel more empowered if they can their mobile phones for other activities apart from for calling, texting and mobile money. Their openness to  embracing new ways of using their simple mobile phones to solve challenges is what drives the culture shift from keeping non-organized farm records on paper or none at all  to digital record keeping,” she says.

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.”

Worldwide, women have much less economic opportunity, security, and freedom. Support women starting their own businesses, going to school, and investing in the health of their communities and families.

We empower individuals with access to credit, simple payments solutions, high-yield investment opportunities and easy-to-use tools for personal financial management. Carbon is headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria. We are a global company of over 90 employees with operations in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya

Carbon is a financial service provided by Carbon Finance & Investments Limited (RC 1044655), licensed and regulated by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). We empower individuals with credit, simple payments solutions, high-yield investment opportunities, and easy-to-use tools for personal financial management. We are a global company of over 90 employees with a presence in Mauritius, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, South Africa, and Kenya.

While CGAP could not confirm the profiles of borrowers in Ghana, experience in East Africa suggests that many are borrowing from formal lenders for the first time. JUMO, one of Ghana’s most successful digital lenders, also operates in Tanzania, where it found that 81 percent of its borrowers had never before borrowed from a formal financial institution. The ability to reach excluded customers and help them to build formal credit histories has always been touted as the promise of digital credit. And while more data are necessary before forming any conclusions about the potential impact of digital loans in West Africa, the results from Ghana are cause for optimism.

Founded in 2015, AgroCenta is an online sales solution for smallholder farmers, with two offerings – supply chain platform AgroTrade, and financial inclusion service AgroPay.

Disrupt Africa reported yesterday AgroCenta was one of six African startups awarded non-equity funding by the GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator. Though the startup’s co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Francis Obirikorang declined to disclose the breakdown of equity versus grant cash, Disrupt Africa can confirm that the GSMA input is worth around US$250,000. Obirikorang said the funds will be used to scale up AgroCenta’s operations in Ghana, while the GSMA grant is more specifically geared towards the AgroPay platform, which provides any smallholder farmer who has traded using AgroTrade with a financial statement they can use to get access to finance.

Enterprise Trustees Limited has launched a partnership with Agrocenta, a digital food distribution platform, to provide retirement solutions as a value addition to small holder farmers in Afram Plains of Ghana.Under the scheme, farmers will make voluntary personal pension contributions during the harvesting seasons from the sale of their produce to Agrocenta.  The benefits will include lump sum payouts, periodic withdrawals and a life insurance cover.Agrocenta currently works with about 46,000 farmers across several regions in Ghana. These farmers will be assisted by Agrocenta field officers to enroll onto the Pensions Scheme via a USSD shortcode at the community level. 

Carbon belives that access to credit and quality financial services is a human right. Its mission is to empower all people with the financial access they need to pursue a life of dignity and prosperity. The FinTech empowers individuals with access to credit, simple payments solutions, high-yield investment opportunities, and easy-to-use tools for personal financial management. Interest ranges from 1.75% – 30%, with an equivalent monthly interest rate of 1 – 21%. The Annual Percentage Rate (APR) on a Carbon loan ranges from 23 – 60.8%. The company recently launched its services in Kenya and is expanding its footprint to additional African countries.

Kiva is a non-profit lending platform well known for its microloan service targeted underserved markets globally. Lendio states that the program has now provided over $500,000 in microloans to business owners worldwide, 98% of whom are female. Lendio first launched the program in 2016. The company describes the program as part of its commitment to entrepreneurship and inclusivity. Lendio provides a microloan to a low-income entrepreneur for every new loan facilitated on its marketplace platform. This voluntary employee-contributed, employer-matched program reports a 94% participation rate among Lendio employees.

Financial planning is the backbone for every type of business to operate efficiently with achieve targeted objective. A single mistake in the financial records or planning can drag the growth of an organization to zero. As a solution, Robo-Advisors serve a digital platform with automated functions backed up with algorithm-driven financial planning services. This digital platform allow to automate the procedure with least or can be said no human supervision. A question might be nudging your mind, “How a digital platform can be able to plan financial operations?” It is a worth question that must be answered before using such a high tech platform.

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.