Expanding on yesterday’s discussion of how MNOs are sweeping up business for the underbanked and unbanked, Igor Pesin of Life.SREDA posted a lovely update giving even more detail. Here is how he saw things … Fintech in Rwanda: the place where Telcos are surpassing Banks in the financial sector Telcos dominate in the financial sector…
During the discussions at Dot Finance Africa, there was a very interesting dialogue about the mobile network operators (MNOs), with panels featuring Airtel and M-PESA. It was interesting to hear them talking directly about how they focus upon the customer experience and their singular objective of convenience. Both MNOs talked about customer convenience. The convenience…
I’m being asked this a lot as the value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have increased ten-fold in the past few weeks. Good for those who have some. Bemusing for those who don’t. There are a range of factors driving the rise in cryptocurrency prices, particularly the craze for Initial Coin Offering (ICOs). An ICO…
I recently had exposure to two industry reports that are worth bringing to your attention. The first is the Innovate Finance research into Industry Sandboxes. Commissioned by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK regulator, the aim was to identify how Industry Sandboxes, rather than Regulatory Sandboxes, can help to create new services in finance….
I’ve regularly got into confrontations with digital currency people, especially those who are believers in bitcoin, by saying things they don’t like to hear. First it was my comment that you can’t have money without government. They believe the currency is beyond control because it exists on a global network. My contention is that money…
I got a very interesting heads-up yesterday to a campaign the European FinTech start-ups have kicked off to try and stop the big, nasty banks screwing them with their version of PSD2. I’ve previously blogged that the banks will implement non-standard APIs to make it difficult to access their services without writing code to work with…
I have no academic papers or historical research view on what I’m about to post, although I will find some, but I was reflecting on my discussions of revolutions in humanity. In particular, the second age of humankind, when we invented money as a control mechanism. Before this seismic change, money didn’t matter. We shared beliefs…
I’ve just spent the last three weeks travelling around too many places to mention, including Germany, UAE, UK and three very different countries: Argentina, Colombia and Pakistan. Argentina is a huge and diverse country of over a million square miles, and a population of 40 million; Colombia is one of the world’s most ecologically diverse…
I blogged recently about American banks beating up the regulators to stop account access via APIs. I heard this in various White House meetings in 2016, and assumed all banks and bank people felt the same way. Well, they don’t. Citi’s head of FinTech Policy, Andres Wolberg-Stok, got in touch to clarify the true situation….
I try to generally avoid making political commentary on the blog as it’s not appropriate. This is a blog about technology and finance, not the economy and politics. Every now and again the two come together such as with Brexit and Donald Trump. Equally sometimes they cannot be avoided as the politics impacts the financial…
