Spring 21 Capstone 640pm

MTN has launched its Mobile Money (MoMo) services in South Africa in partnership with Ubank.

“It is a great privilege for us as a bank to partner with a renowned brand such as MTN in working on a product which will create value for consumers in the under-serviced and under-banked segments of the market.”

Paga is a mobile payment company. We are building an ecosystem to enable people to digitally send and receive money, and creating simple financial access for everyone. Our mission is to make it simple for one billion people to access and use money. Our first market is Nigeria where Paga is the leading mobile payment company.

Paga is a mobile payment company. We are building an ecosystem to enable people to digitally send and receive money, and creating simple financial access for everyone. Our mission is to make it simple for one billion people to access and use money. Our first market is Nigeria where Paga is the leading mobile payment company.

“The importance of remittances to Jamaican residents has risen consistently for over 30 years. Our partnership with JMMB Money Transfer, a trusted and valued partner in the region, will enable us to offer WorldRemit customers more choice, while supporting the transition from offline remittances to safer, faster and lower cost online money transfer options.”

Over 2.5 billion of the world’s adults remain unbanked and have no access to formal banking or semiformal microfinance institutions according to a report by McKinsey.

Pula Advisors, a fintech firm reimagining agricultural insurance to protect smallholders worldwide, with operations in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Malawi has partnered with the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) to deploy satellite-based agricultural insurance to smallholder farmers in Nigeria who are estimated to be around 18 million. With the partnership, Pula will install satellite technology to track a wide range of catastrophes cost effectively, at speed and without missing out on any areas.

“We hope that the high-quality yield and satellite data available today will enable local insurers and Pula Advisors to create an innovative yield predictive model that decreases the cost of area yield index insurance. At the end of the day, we want to make this product more accessible to smallholder families, allowing them to invest with more confidence and increase their yields,” said Emilio Hernandez, who leads CGAP’s work with smallholders.

The deal will see the pair work on the development of new products and services supporting digital payment for customers of Safaricom’s M-Pesa micro-finance and payments platform. The partnership will cover over 24 million M-Pesa customers, more than 173,000 M-Pesa merchants from Safaricom and more than 61 million merchants on Visa’s network. “This partnership will play an important role in delivering even more value to our customers,” says Peter Ndegwa, CEO of Safaricom.

In order to prevent fraudulent transactions, Paga has put certain measures in place to protect its users. A user logging into an unrecognized device, for example, will have to answer a couple of security questions before proceeding. Again, every transaction using Paga has to be finalized with a personal PIN known only to the user.

A prime example of a digitally savvy WiT cohort member is Bismart Insurance, a web insurance aggregator based in Kenya. Channelling a solution-oriented shift to digital, Bismart Insurance was set up to address and resolve key pain points customers faced when purchasing insurance, including a lack of disclosure of essential information and the absence of a consolidated platform for insurance products. Coupled with its participation in the first WiT Kenya cohort and vision to expand into the digital insurance market, Bismart Insurance efficiently scaled its operations and saw over 100 purchasers by the end of 2017.

Heya- fawry is an initiative in collaboration with arab women enterprise fund, Baheya, AXA and unilever to empower women, increase their opportunities in the financial market and help them to climb up the financial inclusion pyramid in Egypt Fawry as the leading e-payment network in Egypt is supporting poor and disadvantaged women by training them to become Heya fawry-agents, providing POS machines offering them complementary micro-insurance coverage. Ultimately, this initiative will allow poor unbanked women to have access to life-enhancing financial services (mobile top-ups, bill payments, money transfers, microloan payments, as well as essential nutrition and healthcare goods) directly via their nearest Fawry’s agents to raise income for them and their families and to enhance the well-being of the society. Fawry’s main aim is “to ensure that women access our services in the same extent as men do”

Aujourd’hui, près de 19 millions de Kényans font un usage régulier de M-Pesa soit près de 70 % de la population adulte. Chaque seconde, environ 900 transactions sont réalisées par ce biais. Au total, M-Pesa voit transiter 68 % des transactions monétaires du pays, représentant en valeur 7 % des montants passant par l’ensemble des moyens de paiement du système bancaire et financier kényan, soit 25 Mds USD par an ou un peu plus du tiers du PIB du pays.

A comprehensive fintech ecosystem has become a key focus and a major driver of new value creation for the JSE-listed company, with fintech revenue increasing by 30.7% to R4.7-billion during the six months to June.

The Mastercard Foundation Fund for Rural Prosperity (FRP) is investing $2.8 million in three companies from Burundi, Malawi, and Uganda to support projects that expand financial inclusion in rural Africa.

The three companies, Prothem Usine, Pula Advisors, and Enviu BV, were selected from among 195 firms that submitted applications to the third phase of the Fund’s 2017/2018 rolling competition. This competition is an effort to find and support scalable financial products and services for rural areas of Africa.

Cependant, l’application, qui se rapproche de ce que fait Lydia en Europe, n’est pas limitée au marché nigérian. En effet, la société cherche à étendre ses activités en Afrique de l’Ouest et au-delà. En janvier, Paga a ainsi mis la main sur la société éthiopienne Apposit pour se développer dans ce pays d’Afrique de l’Est. L’Éthiopie est le deuxième pays le plus peuplé d’Afrique avec 109 millions d’habitants, derrière le Nigeria et ses 200 millions d’habitants. Paga a également ouvert un bureau au Mexique pour déployer son service de paiement mobile cette année. Une expansion à l’international qui traduit les ambitions de la start-up de devenir une plateforme FinTech de référence dans les pays émergents.

MTN Nigeria recovered from elevated volatility caused by COVID-19 to record massive revenue growth from digital and fintech services in the nine months ended 30 September.

MTN has announced a partnership with South Africa-based financial services group Sanlam to sell high-end insurance products like life cover and funeral policies into South Africa through digital-only channels.

Gam’eyat, Arabic word for Money circles, is a deeply established method within the Egyptian population for saving and rotating large sums of money, where a group of people form a circle and each person contributes a specific amount of money, all amounts are combined together, and members of the circle get the whole payout one by one.

WorldRemit is just one of many different money transfer services that have become increasingly popular, especially since coronavirus has taken hold. Money transfer services are perfect for moving funds around, and thanks to quite a lot of competition they're now a relatively cheap and easy way of getting the job done. WorldRemit was set up in 2010, is headquartered in London and sits in the same marketplace as the likes of Azimo, Transferwise, CurrencyFair, Lebara Money Transfer, PayPal, Zelle and other competitors.

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.

MTN, Africa’s biggest mobile carrier, has continued to weather COVID-19 pressures in Nigeria, recording double-digit growth in data revenue and fintech services in the six months ending June.

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.

“Know Your Customer” - or KYC - is a verification process in the financial industry. If you have ever opened a bank account or applied for insurance, then you have been a subject to KYC checks. All regulated financial companies are responsible for building their KYC checks based on global and national anti-money laundering standards. This way, companies can make sure that it’s a suitable verification process for their customers, services and industry. If customers can’t provide any formal identification, or if it is difficult to authenticate it, companies can’t easily identify them and offer them their services.