I just hosted a conference in Africa and you cannot attend a conference in Africa without financial inclusion, mobile wallets and microfinance coming up. It’s always on the agenda and top of mind, because most Africans have been excluded from financial services to date. In particular, focusing upon Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)*, which includes Kenya, Nigeria,…
I was talking the other day to a colleague about the phenomenon in Asia, India, Africa and South America taking place with mobile payments and the lack of take-up in the USA. Why is this, I wondered? Then got my answer, although it isn’t a singular factor but a combination of factors. First, there are…
I just read an interesting new report from Deloitte about blockchain. They tracked the history of 86,034 blockchain projects hosted on GitHub since 2009 to pull out “key lessons” on where the blockchain industry is going and its long-term prospects. Here are some of the highlights: More than 26,000 blockchain projects were started in 2016,…
Unless you have been asleep for the last year, you cannot have failed to catch the buzz around bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum’s Ether and Ripple’s XRP. There are even some coins that were created as a joke that are getting significant investments, such as Dogecoin. Dogecoin was created as a way to…
I was sent a nice list of the Top 50 FinTech firms selected by Forbes. They introduce it as follows: Worldwide, $27.4 billion poured into fintech startups in 2017, Accenture reports, up 18% from 2016. With so much in play, it’s not surprising that 22 companies are new on this, the third edition of our list….
Someone made the comment on my platform piece about what happens when there are no Jack Ma’s or Mark Zuckerberg’s, as the whole thing is decentralised? I guess that this is logical as my last line was that government control of cryptocurrencies is “not so easy for cryptocurrencies that have no head office or central…
I often talk about my week in Hangzhou last year, writing the case study on Ant Financial for the new book Digital Human, and particularly the words of Jack Ma on how he sees managing the Alibaba platform: Management. The word is there for regular companies. At Alibaba we treat it more like governing an…
I was looking around at what’s new online, and just discovered the Hiscox 2018 Cyber Readiness Report. This is the second Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report, conducted by Forrester Consulting, and puts the spotlight not only on the financial consequences of individual cyber breaches but also on the enormous cost in terms of investment made to…
In my blog yesterday, I talked about the technology titans being liked and potentially trusted with money, but I still don’t think they will open full-service banking. Instead, I think they will focus upon full-service information. The reason I say this is that they don’t want to be banks, it is not core, but they…
I spotted two stories about BBVA that appeared yesterday. The first was in the Financial Times with BBVA Chairman Francisco Gonzalez asking the G20 to take action against the big internet firms, saying “authorities [need] to bring order to this massive change” that could “pose risks to financial stability”. He warns that groups such as…
