SimbaPay and Family Bank will generate revenues on the WeChat-based transfer service through a fee share arrangement on transactions. “We have a sliding scale of charges [for the service]. For example, to send the equivalent of $80 will cost $3.50,” said Sagini.This presents a significant reduction of fees and opportunity cost for Kenyan traders who import from China, according to Sagini and Family Bank.Current available payment methods to China for Kenyan businesses are less secure and more expensive options, such as traditional money transmitters (Western Union), SWIFT and off the grid services, according to Sagini and Family Bank Chief Operation Officer (COO) Godfrey Kamau Kariuki.

Capitec partners with EasyEquities to offer share trading in SA and US The move is part of a broader strategy to provide diverse financial services through a partnership network

EasyEquities owner Purple has finally turned a profit, which is key to the group’s ambitious growth plans

EasyEquities clients were informed that they won’t be able to buy Nokia shares for now.

Always a step ahead of the game when it comes to finding innovative solutions to keep their customers satisfied, our smart friends over at EasyEquities partnered with InvestSure in 2018 to provide a safety net for a selection of shares in their portfolio.

EasyEquities and Satrix hae once again received the overall award for Best African FinTech Company 2017 at the Finance Indaba Africa in Johannesburg last week. The award was shared with ThisIsMe, an identity verification and due diligence platform. The African FinTech Awards is part of Finance Indaba Africa, the largest conference and expo for finance professionals on the continent. The EasyEquities/Satrix combined entry also scooped the honours in the InvestTech category for the second year running. The runners-up in the category were global property-trading platform Wealth Migrate and multi-counter stock exchange, ZAR X.

“The business is growing and we plan to attract new talent. We are growing globally into Africa and other markets and we are constantly enhancing our technology,” said Thomas.

EasyEquities grew revenue by 140% to R28.6 million in the six months to end-February as the number of funded retail investment accounts more than doubled to 199,491. The platform generated a R76,000 profit for the period from a R12.4 million loss previously. Platform assets quadrupled to R15.8 billion.

Last year we predicted partnerships between banks, insurers and fintechs. We saw a couple of notable events: the joint venture between Capitec and Easy Equities where Capitec is offering Easy Equities to its client base. The game changer in the payments space was Vodacom partnering with Alipay, although recent regulatory developments in China around fintech could hamstring these efforts. Standard Bank bought Tradesafe, a digital escrow services provider. OUTsurance and Shoprite partnered to offer funeral and life insurance to Shoprite customers. Telkom Business partnered with fintech startup, Fundrr, to offer loans to businesses wanting to grow.

Last year we predicted partnerships between banks, insurers and fintechs. We saw a couple of notable events: the joint venture between Capitec and Easy Equities where Capitec is offering Easy Equities to its client base. The game changer in the payments space was Vodacom partnering with Alipay, although recent regulatory developments in China around fintech could hamstring these efforts. Standard Bank bought Tradesafe, a digital escrow services provider. OUTsurance and Shoprite partnered to offer funeral and life insurance to Shoprite customers. Telkom Business partnered with fintech startup, Fundrr, to offer loans to businesses wanting to grow.

"We believe that this investment revival should be led by investments in securities on the JSE." said Almero Oosthuizen, VP of Business Development at EasyEquities, eloborating on what led to the founding of the FinTech startup.

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.

Like most innovations, Kiva is not entirely new. Rather, it is an ingenious fusion of older ideas. One is child sponsorship, which Save the Children pioneered in 1940. A family in a rich country sends $10 or $20 each month to a designated child in a poor country via a charity. In return, the family receives a photo and an update at least once a year. When I was perhaps eight, my family sponsored Constance, a Greek girl about my age, through Save the Children. I remember looking at her solemn face in two successive black and white portraits, trying to judge how much she had grown in a year.

Kiva lenders receive on average about 96% of their money back and agree not to receive interest. “It is done philanthropically,” Shah says. For many, presumably, it is their first impact investment.

he adopted approach is applied and evaluated employing a selection of cases from individual loans. From this perspective, the case base and the codified knowledge about how to evaluate risks associated with a loan represent two examples of knowledge IT artifacts.

Engagement Drivers in a Lending Marketplace: The Case for Kiva

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.

The basic model of the Kiva intermediary model, illustrated in Figure 1, is that small lenders lend to Kiva. Kiva lends to MFIs. These MFIs then lend to poor people. Thus the MFIs are using Kiva as a financing agency. Kiva is actually providing a service to small lenders who want to participate directly in the microfinance movement. In the Kiva model, there is no interest given by Kiva to the lender and no interest charged by Kiva to the MFI. However, the MFI charges normal interest rates to the poor borrower. Kiva is a not-forprofit.

This paper reports the results of a large-scale field experiment designed to test the hypothesis that group membership can increase participation and prosocial lending for an online crowdlending community, Kiva. The experiment uses variations on a simple email manipulation to encourage Kiva members to join a lending team, testing which types of team recommendation emails are most likely to get members to join teams as well as the subsequent impact on lending. We find that emails do increase the likelihood that a lender joins a team, and that joining a team increases lending in a short window (1 wk) following our intervention. The impact on lending is large relative to median lender lifetime loans. We also find that lenders are more likely to join teams recommended based on location similarity rather than team status. Our results suggest team recommendation can be an effective behavioral mechanism to increase prosocial lending.

he “Kiva.org: Crowd-Sourced Microfinance and Lending Team Cooperative Behavior” study focuses on evaluating the extent to which Solidarity as a design-lever impacts social behavior. Looking specifically at Kiva.org as a prominent community for peer-to-peer lending, this study seeks to evaluate the advent of “Lending Teams,” their subsequent impact on group lending behavior, and the extent to which group openness, size, and categorization substantively alters online cooperative behavior.