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Though each Hello brand represents a different service, they all share one key feature - the mobile phone is the access point for their service.

Belcash is the proprietor and provider of the 'Hello' brand. We attempt to find the perfect fit for our customers and partners. This heavy focus on customer service, innovation and professionalism means that our stakeholders are proud to identify themselves with us

Industry leaders from across the African and global FinTech industry will gather at Finnovation Africa: Ethiopia 2017 where they will seek to harness the growing momentum around digital financial services into more inclusive and productive economies across Sub‐Saharan Africa.”

MTN has also recorded an increase in data revenue which it ascribed to “greater population coverage, a revamp of our data portfolio and initiatives to drive 4G device penetration”

“Our customers have been asking for a Mukuru App, and we have made sure to develop and present a solution that empowers our customers to send money back home to their families in an even safer and more convenient way. Mukuru has always given its customers the ability to transact when and wherever they need to through our existing USSD and WhatsApp offerings – the Mukuru App adds a richer experience and more control for a customer to manage their profile,”

“Our customers have been asking for a Mukuru App, and we have made sure to develop and present a solution that empowers our customers to send money back home to their families in an even safer and more convenient way. Mukuru has always given its customers the ability to transact when and wherever they need to through our existing USSD and WhatsApp offerings – the Mukuru App adds a richer experience and more control for a customer to manage their profile,”

The future is really exciting for us and links into why we participate in these fintech festivals. We think what we’ve proven in South Africa is scalable to other markets, especially those with similar setup to South Africa five years ago. Our focus is largely on emerging markets and seeking to partner our capability into a market opportunity, where the partner brings local knowledge and regulatory understanding and we bring platform capability. There needs to be a level of maturity and fintech support that enables our business model. There must be a very strong payments layer and smartphone penetration rates must be good. If those are in place and there’s a low propensity for retail stock investors to be investing in the local stock market, we start to be interested.

M-PESA is a very popular service among Kenyans as it serves to increase money circulation in the economy by offering a fast and secure mode of transferring money, making payments and also borrowing and repaying loans.

The chatbot will also enable 24/7 instant customer service for its customers across Africa and Europe. Daniel Howard, CTO for SimbaPay, says: “Another major objective we achieved with the chatbot service is that it also works without internet. This means customers with a mobile phone, even a basic phone without internet access, can access the SimbaPay chatbot using SMS.” Together with Interswitch, SimbaPay says its B2B division offers its instant remittance technology to banks and telcos who want to provide their customers with the service. To send money with an SMS users need the recipient’s phone number and the chatbot will automatically obtain the recipient bank account or mobile money details.

Kiva has promoted itself as a link between individual lenders in the developed world and individual borrowers in the developing world, allowing visitors to its Web site to learn about and lend money to people in poor nations seeking small loans for specific purposes.

the loans made by individual lenders through the Kiva site do not actually end up in the pockets of individual borrowers. Instead, those loans are aggregated and used to backstop microfinance institutions that have already paid out microloans to the borrowers featured on the site.

Kiva president Premal Shah said he could foresee a day when Kiva really did provide a direct person-to-person connection, once certain legal hurdles are cleared and as more individuals in the developing world began using mobile phones to access credit and make electronic payments. In the meantime, the organization has changed the wording on its homepage from "Kiva lets you lend to a specific entrepreneur, empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty" to "Kiva connects people through lending to alleviate poverty."

he London-based digital money transfer services SimbaPay has now launched a new money remittance services that will purely operate via SMS. That means even people with no internet and using just a feature phone can now use SimbaPay to send or receive money. This is a huge step for the company, as it now enters a bigger pool of users, both with smartphones plus internet access combined with those without smartphones and/or not internet access. The new SimbaPay SMS money remittance services went live yesterday, and now users from around the world can use the service on any device from anywhere via the good-old SMS. The new SMS service is powered by artificial intelligence that has seen SimbaPay integrate a chatbot at the other end of the user.

Funding Pula: Insuretech Startup Closes $6M Series A Funding to Scale Up Business Across Africa 0 SharesShareTweetSharePin The African Insuretech service provider, Pula, has recently closed a US$6 million Series A funding round led by TLcom Capital and had participation from Women’s World Banking. It specializes in digital as well as agric insurance to derisk smallholder farmers across Africa. This new round of investment to the insuretech startup will be used to scale up operations in the company’s existing 13 markets across Africa. Pula has so far impacted over 4.3 million farmers on the continent and the new funding will help push its expansion into Asia to power resilience and profitability for Asian smallholder farmers. Pula was launched by Rose Goslinga and Thomas Njeru in 2015, to design and deliver innovative agricultural insurance and digital products to help smallholders farmers improve their farming practices, endure climate risks and bolster their incomes. This has become necessary because for smallholder farmers in emerging markets, the traditional method of calculating insurance through farm visits is often expensive, meaning they are often neglected from financial protection against climate risks.

A new service will enable the bank’s customers living internationally to send money to friends and family in Kenya via SimbaPay’s app. The service is initially available for the UK-Kenya payments corridor, with other countries to follow soon.

SimbaPay's head of operations, Victor Karanja, stated the service will provide a seamless platform for Prime Bank's customer base to send money abroad.

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.

A whole range of companies within the banking and FinTech industries are starting to explore ways through which they can take advantage of the electronic ledger technology that powers cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin

A whole range of companies within the banking and FinTech industries are starting to explore ways through which they can take advantage of the electronic ledger technology that powers cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. This distributed system stores data chronologically in segments known as “blocks” which allow for the information to be processed and transferred almost instantaneously. Among the benefits of the blockchain technology, that make it so attractive to FinTech companies and other large institutions, is the lowered risk of fraud since the technology is notoriously difficult to hack, its speed and the fact that it eliminates intermediary steps between parties in a transaction.

The startup will initially offer a small range of service and products that will be expanded quickly, with the interface being developed by the Bismart team allowing the distribution of insurance products across Africa, facilitating the rapid roll-out and scaling of the business. Bismart will also use blockchain-based smart contracts in order to facilitate policy management and offer the security of decentralised databases

Agent banking has increasingly gained importance in developing countries over the last two decades. However, the extent to which agent banking can be used as a tool to mobilize deposit in the banking sector remains largely unknown and the true benefits of the agent banking model to customers, the banks and the bank agents also remains largely unstudied. The main objective of the study was to assess factors affecting agent banking deposit mobilization in case of lion international bank s.c. The study was conducted among 1,300 recorded agents with a respondent sample of 306 agents.

I always wondered why people would run away from insurance agents, yet insurance is a very important risk management tool. So, I joined insurance firstly, because I was tired of my job at the ICT company, and, secondly, because I wanted to investigate if what insurance agents were selling at the time was genuine.

Bismart was awarded seed capital of Sh1 million in April 2018 by Standard chartered Women in Tech programmed and office space for nine months at IBIZ Africa incubator, as the most innovative and scalable business model in Kenya.

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jul 9- GreenTec Capital, a German investment boutique focused on African start-ups, has entered into an investment agreement with Bismart, a Kenyan start-up insurance aggregator leveraging on digital platforms and technologies to educate and advice customers on the best insurance and investment solutions available in the Kenya market.