Spring 21 Capstone 640pm

MoneyFellows has raised a total of $5.6M in funding over 5 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jun 22, 2020 from a Series A round.MoneyFellows is funded by 8 investors. Sawari Ventures and Partech are the most recent investors.

Hellomarket will be the platform used for local transactions, enabling buyers to order, deliver and pay for goods through electronic banking services. Belcash has signed an agreement with DHL Express, a Germany company, for logistics services.

For buyers abroad, Belcash introduced Helloshop, a platform that allows domestic products to be ordered through the firm’s portal and the payment to be processed through Mastercard Payment Gateway Services.

“This will make foreign currency flow through the proper channels to local banks,” said Zewdu Assefa, deputy CEO of Belcash Ethiopia. “The seller receives the Birr equivalent of the amount earned in foreign currency.”

BelCash Technology Solution PLC has partnered with two banks to launch HelloCash mobile money services in Ethiopia. Launched in partnership with Lion International Bank and Somali Micro Finance, the service will provide financial services to all Ethiopians

BelCash Technology Solution PLC has partnered with two banks to launch HelloCash mobile money services in Ethiopia. Launched in partnership with Lion International Bank and Somali Micro Finance, the service will provide financial services to all Ethiopians. It will enable existing and potential customers of Lion International Bank and Somali Micro Finance to carry out transactions in four key areas of financial transactions: Deposit, Withdraw, Transfer and make payments.

Key standouts of HelloCash include its interoperability and shared infrastructure features. The system is designed for multiple banks and MFIs to be interconnected and offer mobile money services to their respective customers. This allows partnering financial institutions to share each other’s agent and branch networks to serve each other’s customers.

One of the uniqueness of HelloCash mobile money services is its interoperability and shared infrastructure features. The system is designed for multi banks and MFI’s to be interconnected and offer the mobile money service to their respective customers, therefore, partnering financial institutions are able to share each other’s agent and branch network to serve each other’s customers.

BelCash is a company known to have introduced an advanced use of technology to provide customized solutions in convenient payments to vital government services in 2010. It has since refurbished what was once a bureaucratic paper system which inconvenienced millions of people who depend on it.

With Ethiopia moving to a strategy which helps embrace the wisdom of solar energy within the country and play catch-up to successes achieved in neighboring nations such as Kenya and Rwanda; HelloSolar in partnership with BelCash – the mobile banking platform system – is set to introduce a pay-as-you-go system for the nation’s off-grid population with affordable solar home system.

This is a jump-the-queue strategy for the company in offering such a system and becoming a pioneer in a country whose majority of population still lack basic energy. In addition, the company has launched an International Remittance payment system, to allow members of the Diaspora to pay from anywhere in the world with a credit card and convenience local clients.

The launch of the services, which allow customers to make payments or receive money via a mobile that is linked to a bank account, mirrors technology used in other African nations that has drawn millions of people into the financial system.

Users wanting to join a circle on MoneyFellows need to complete basic identity verification if the payout is low. If the payout is higher, the users will need to provide more documents such as income verification and assets owned to the company, which will provide a credit score.

Today, MoneyFellows has racked up more than 500,000 users, of which 200,000 are active. Active users refer to those who have completed their accreditation by providing all of the documents required and have joined money circles. Mr Wadi estimates that a “few hundred million Egyptian pounds” have rotated through the platform.

Video technology has been gaining steam as a marketing medium for quite some time and the trend is showing no signs of slowing down. Video currently represents close to 70 percent of all internet traffic and will reach 80 percent of traffic by 2019, according to a recent report by Cisco. That’s nearly a million minutes of video being shared every second! We’ve also seen video make its mark on both the social and media landscape as well. Facebook has opened live streaming to all users, and the advent of tools such as Blab, Meerkat and Periscope have changed the way news is being reported as reporters have started using livestreaming tools to give viewers unprecedented access and intimacy to breaking news events.

Latest figures put the value of the cryptocurrency market at almost $240bn in 2019, nearly double the 2018 figure of $128bn. Could this mean that the global crypto market is starting to move into the mainstream? Significantly, the sector is enjoying rapid growth globally, with the UK, Nigeria, Australia, Canada, Mexico and India all experiencing a recent surge in users. Crypto is also starting to attract interest from institutional investors, which see it as possible insurance against the global rise in quantitative easing.

The big banking brands have shown little interest in cryptocurrency to date. In part, this is due to their general aversion to high levels of risk and an institutionalised culture ill suited to digital change and innovation – but there is also a legitimate fear that they will fall foul of financial regulators. 

It stands to reason that cryptocurrency exchanges are well positioned and strongly motivated to exploit the narrowing gap between crypto and fiat – because they have first-move advantage. Having already built huge cash reserves and crypto-familiar customer bases, it would be relatively straightforward technically for them to add on banking services. 

Investment in financial technology (“Fintech”) companies is growing dramatically. Global Fintech funding has risen to over $100 billion, fueled by large M&A deals and large rounds of financing. Investment in Fintech companies is expected to continue to grow significantly in the next few years as such companies offer outsized growth opportunities.

As Financial Services organizations think through their FinTech and Cloud Strategy, while there’s clear momentum across industries, and in Financial Services itself, there are still security and efficiency challenges that need to be addressed.

Cloud wastage remains a pain point that can be addressed by going serverless and a solid approach to security needs to be central to the strategy. According to McAfee, 1,004 distinct cloud services being used by the average financial services firm, a 32.1% YOY growth – based on a survey of 3.7M finance employees over 14,000 cloud services. What’s more, according to MarketsandMarkets, the predicted size of the Finance Cloud Market is expected to reach $29.47B by 2021, which represents a 24.4% CAGR.

SnapScan wants to see a cashless, frictionless society. For the customer, the app poses an alternative to cash and credit cards because it’s faster. Customers don’t need to wait in a queue, or for the PoS terminal to finish processing their payment. You can simply take a picture of the merchant’s unique QR code, enter the amount, and they’ll be notified either via SMS or their PoS system. The merchant can set up the system in five minutes (SnapScan claims) with no hardware required other than a mobile phone. This means that any person selling apples on the street to a department store can integrate SnapScan. There are also fewer costs involved compared to setting up a credit card terminal, the only charge being a 3% transaction fee. Secondly, it’s meant to be more secure. With SnapScan’s method of payment, the merchant never has to handle your details or card. The app user’s card details are stored on their smartphones and protected with their personal PIN codes.

This week, SnapScan rolled its app out to The Big Issue vendors across South Africa, the non-profit magazine that’s usually sold at intersections in urban areas. People with the app can now purchase the latest issue by simply taking a photo of a QR code and typing in the amount they want to pay. There’s no hassle of fiddling for your wallet or looking for change lying around in the car before the light turns green.

Unique challenges are mainly regulations for Fintech companies usually being a grey area, without enough clarity on what exactly they might fall under.With lack of enough funds and diversity, fundraising is also another challenge for most of the startups in the MENA region.

Tackling these challenges, the EFSE Fund and the SANAD Fund for MSME, advised by Finance in Motion, have partnered with Village Capital and the LHoFT to develop the Fincluders Bootcamp 2017, unique investment readiness program designed for entrepreneurs offering inclusive financial products.

‘Financial Inclusion’ might be the most noble sector of financial technology, solving problems the traditional finance industry won’t — servicing underbanked demographics in areas with poor financial infrastructure.

PROMOTE Find the most effective channel for your niche In consideration of some financial constraints, fintech companies must distribute their content in the channel where they’ll reach their target audience – and this may not necessarily be the most popular channel. For example, Facebook may have 2.3 billion active users but most of your customers might be a certain type of professional who mostly hang out on LinkedIn, then that may be the best channel for you. Some fintech companies find traction in Reddit, while others are big on Telegram. Find an online space where most of your customers go to seek solutions and tailor your content to reach them.

A study shows that 80% of decision makers prefer to gather information about a company via articles than make their purchase decisions based on advertisement and marketing materials. It’s clear. The most effective marketing strategy used by fintech companies is content marketing. By allocating significant efforts in creating, publishing and distributing digital content tailored to a specific market or audience, customers, as well as bottom line, are served well.

Most fintech companies get the biggest bunch of their sales from the internet. This is because the first thing people do when they need to find out more information about a finance product or service is to search for solution providers online. For this reason, every fintech company needs to have a robust online presence. When buyers start researching, their first aim is to gather information. They don’t necessarily focus on your marketing materials because there are lots of adverts on the internet, which aren’t always reliable

The purpose of this study was to establish the effects of implementation of Fintech strategies on competitiveness in the banking sector in Kenya

The growth of cloud computing is a trend that M-Pesa hopes to exploit. Servers that are accessed via the internet and are located in data centres are referred to as the “cloud”. Using them means that companies don’t have to manage their own servers or run software on their own machines.

The main telecoms operators in the country are all pitching in too – starting with Safaricom which uses the M-Pesa mobile application. In my book “Startup Lions, at the heart of African Tech” I explain how M-Pesa was born organically (and unexpectedly) from contact with the poorest Kenyan populations who didn’t even have bank accounts. A great many of them used ‘m-banking’ to gain financial independence which led to the M-Pesa service having over 22.6 million users in Kenya in 2019 – almost two-thirds of the adult population. A few hours after the president’s announcement, M-Pesa decided to drastically reduce its usage fees and to remove the daily transaction volume limit across the board in order to increase cash flow.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the pricing strategies of French FinTech Firms (FFFs) using quantitative descriptive and correlational research methods. Based on a representative sample of 246 FFF, the study provided consistent support for the hypotheses, which argues that FFFs with high price-setting power may implement a combination of the price-setting strategy (PSS) “skimming” and the price-setting practice (PSP) “value-informed”. FFFs applying “market-based” PSSs tend to use “competition-informed” PSP preferring “pay-per-use” price-setting model (PSM). Whilst FFFs who apply “penetration” PSS tend to use “cost-informed” PSP and “pay-per-use” PSM. The findings support founders and senior management in their pricing decisions. This paper contributes to the existing literature on pricing strategies of early-stage high-tech companies. There is a need for further research about the change of pricing strategies during the lifecycle of a firm using for example a longitudinal quantitative study.

The rise of Fintech challenges established financial centres and incumbent financial institutions to rethink their strategies to remain obligatory passage points in the age of digitizing finance. To appreciate these changes, it is important to maintain theoretical interchange between developments in financial geography and economic geography, its parent discipline

There is a saying among corporate bankers “You only get credit if you don’t need it”. Translated into business terms: there were underserved customers, ignored by traditional financial industry, who couldn’t apply for a loan or credit. And that helped a lot of fintech startups, the likes of Finiata (Netguru is proud to be a partner here) or Lenddo, to put their foot in the door.