Opinion

A last post about financial inclusion and banking. I pondered the thought of how people who get inclusion will gradually rise and upscale to full service banking. I see it almost as a ladder of steps from exclusion to banked as follows: Step One: Financially Excluded (Hawala) These are people who have no access to…

As mentioned yesterday, I always get a new take on life when I come to Africa, and this visit is no exception. I’m chairing conferences where a range of start-ups, telco’s and banks are talking about their experiences and views. Halfway through the dialogue, a lightning bolt cracked through my forehead. Not literally obviously, that…

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…

Lots of people talk a good talk about the internet of things and how my washing machine could now make purchases but my question is: what would my washing machine want to buy? More powder and some salt maybe? A replacement for the dish that just broke? An intelligent washing machine buying things on the…

Someone pointed out to me that when I wrote about the wealth divide, a lot of the property investing is not your average John or Jane, but a lot of money launderers. I wrote a while ago  that there is $1.6 trillion of money laundered worldwide every year, and only 2% is caught. That leaves…

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…

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 am very taken by the articulate and charismatic Jack Ma. Not because he’s one of the richest men in the world, but more because of his experiences and beliefs. If you haven’t listened to his interviews and thoughts at this years World Economic Summit, then I’d recommend you take the time out to do…

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…