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SimbaPay (http://www.SimbaPay.com) is revolutionizing the remittance space through its official announcement of raising the single transaction limit to a whopping $45,000. This is substantially higher than the previous transaction limit of $3,000. According to Victor Karanja, Head of Operations at SimbaPay, sending money home and buying property across Africa has just become a whole lot easier. “A pain point for customers in the past has been having to undertake multiple transfers to complete a single purchase.” “A key risk with multiple transfers was exchange rate fluctuation. Sending up to $45,000 with just our mobile app will protect senders from the fluctuation that arises when one splits up the transfer,” said Karanja.

The discussion in this section is centered around mobile money and mobile financial services. These terms are not meant to exclude digital payments and digital finance from the discussion. While a systematic distinction between the terms – that are often used interchangeably in the literature, with ‘digital’, however, referring to the end user requiring access to digital devices (as opposed to a simple text-based mobile phone) – can be useful, as generally speaking access to the internet enhances possibilities [17••], we instead explicitly mention the role of the internet wherever access is critical, as most of the services outlined below (or at least some equivalents) are accessible without internet. This point has to be evaluated positively in terms of accessibility.

AIG Insurance Company has signed an agreement with Fawry, a digital payment platform.The partnership concerns the marketing of "Qershak el Abyad", an electronic policy managed by Fawry Insurance Brokerage.The product will thus be available through Fawry's network of 151 000 sales outlets and numerous distribution channels (banks, telephone operators, etc.) used by more than 30 million consumers.

SimbaPay uses advanced security technology and leading global partners to ensure the safety and security of your data and transaction

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.

Send money to recipients in these countries ASIA: China, IndiaEUROPE: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Portugal, Spain, TurkeyAFRICA: Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, MadagascarCOMING SOON: Canada, USA & Australia among other countries

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.

Fawry Microfinance, a subsidiary of the listed Fawry for Banking and Payment Technology Services, intends to borrow at least EGP 300 million from its existing shareholders, Enterprise cited Fawry CEO Ashraf Sabry on December 14th

Fawry’s subsidiary plans to expand its microfinance portfolio to EGP 500 million by the end of 2021, up from EGP 204 million until September 2020, the news portal added.“We have seen solid growth in 2020 and we see the potential of lending to small businesses to finance their working capital and purchases from suppliers,” Enterprise quoted Sabry as saying.

M-Pesa “grew at a blistering pace following its inception in 2007.” [1] In less than two years from its launch, M-Pesa had become the leading money transfer method in the country, with over 50 percent of people sending money via M-Pesa and over 65 percent receiving funds through the system in 2009. By 2015 there were 19.9 million active M-Pesa users, up 18 percent from 2013/14. It is said that 43 percent of Kenya's GDP flowed through M-Pesa, with over 237 million person-to-person transactions.

M-Pesa is an SMS-based system that enables users to deposit, send and withdraw funds using their mobile phone. Customers do not need to have a bank account and can transact at any of the country's 40,000 agent outlets. Registration and deposits are free and pricing for most other transactions is based on a tiered structure to allow even the lowest-income users to use the system. Transaction values are typically small, ranging from US$5 to US$30.

Cloud computing The banking, payment and insurance industries rely heavily on the outsourcing of various operational processes to cloud computing service providers (eg, Amazon, Google and Microsoft). The increasing reliance of the European financial sector on foreign entities has recently given French and European regulators cause for concern. In 2017, the European Banking Authority (EBA) published its "Recommendations on Outsourcing to Cloud Service Providers. These recommendations were later included in the update of the EBA Guidelines on Outsourcing Arrangements (EBA/GL/2019/02), which are fully implemented at the national level by the Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority (ACPR). The EBA guidelines require banking and financial institutions to enter into written agreements with their service providers (including cloud service providers). These agreements should notably include provisions detailing the reporting obligations of the service provider and the audit rights of the competent authorities. In practice, the main cloud service providers are reluctant to enter into agreements which comply with the requirements of the EBA guidelines. This has prompted French and European banking and financial institutions to report these issues to their regulators. This review could lead to the drafting of a European regulation or directive determining standard contractual provisions which would be mandatorily included in agreements with cloud service providers.

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.

BCTS has successfully implemented its HelloCash mobile banking platform and 8 000 agents network with 6 local banks and 2 microfinance institutions, making it the largest financial network in the country.This achievement has gained recognition from the UN initiative for financial inclusion, which was substantiated by the visit of UN ambassador for financial inclusion, her Royal Majesty Queen Maxima of the Netherlands in May 2019.

With 17 strong through partnerships, across multiple sectors and an ownership structure in full compliance with the Ethiopian regulations, BelCash Payments-As-A-Platform model spurred numerous “HelloServices”. These services include airtime eTop-up, Pay-As-You-Go solar, Healthcare, eCommerce, Jobs, Entertainment, and many more, providing the Ethiopian population access to essential services through the HelloCash platform and agents network.

BelCash Technology Solutions Ltd. (BCTS) was established in Ethiopia in 2011, as a registered Value-Added Service (VAS) . It'main activity is to provides its digital technology platforms to businesses as a service (PaaS).

“Our mission goes beyond proving affordable access to energy,” Michael Tesfaye Hiruy, the companies Chief Strategy Officer told The Reporter. “Moving forward, we will forge the necessary partnerships to provide access to connectivity and digital services such as healthcare, education, market access and employment”.

Firepay launched SnapScan in partnership with Standard Bank in 2014. The SnapScan app allows users to pay for goods and services using only their mobile phone. Today, the company has 32 000 physical and online merchants.

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.

Irrespective of its importance to the customers and financial system, ethioPay interbank service is operating inefficiently. Since there are no studies conducted on this topic especially on ethioPay, this study has been conducted with an objective of identifying challenges and opportunities of ethioPay ATM from perspectives of interconnected banks and supervisors.

Since 2017, AgroCenta has successfully completed two rounds of funding to the tune of $750,000 to expand operations in Ghana. In 2017, AgroCenta won the Seedstars Global Competition against other 72 startups from emerging markets across the globe. AgroCenta has grown its farmer base to 45,000 providing additional services of access to finance for smallholder farmers, bringing smallholder farmers onto the financial sector to enjoy services such as crop insurance, micro lending/input financing, mobile payments through mobile money and finally pensions schemes targeted at farmers and beneficiaries in the informal sector with special attention to women and youth. Since 2017, AgroCenta has helped over 28,000 farmers sell over 20,000MT of commodities to large, medium and small scale buyers across the country.   In December 2018, AgroCenta won a grant of $250,000 from GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator Fund to further build its financial inclusion platform AgroPay targeted at rural smallholder farmers.

The policies or “smart contracts” currently under development are based on blockchain, the distributed ledger technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. This avoids the need for paperwork and means payouts can be triggered automatically when certain conditions are met, such as a specific number of days of drought. The system uses high-resolution satellite images to detect rainfall and plant growth data.Conventional crop insurance is too expensive for more than 500m small farmers worldwide, says Christopher Sheehan, founder and chief executive of US-based WorldCover, which developed the system. “But with machine learning and blockchain technology, we can process these data very cheaply to produce a really simple crop insurance product with premiums of $20 to $50 for a farmer who might only be earning $3,000 a year.” Payments can be made using mobile money transfer services such as M-Pesa.