Financial innovations like mobile money have gained fame for transforming commerce in the developing world. But they’re also helping the poor escape poverty. In an earlier post, I showed how over the past few years M-PESA and other kinds of “mobile money” have made sending money across…
Last Friday, I gave the opening remarks at the International Finance Corporation's annual FinTech CEO Summit — a meeting of many of the top executives involved in developing cutting-edge alternatives to conventional means for raising capital and making payments, among other things. Because the event wasn't recorded,…
Tom Clougherty’s recent Alt-M post on competition (or the lack thereof) in UK banking nicely highlights the problem posed by barriers to entry into the British banking industry. That there is indeed an entry problem should be obvious from the fact that Metro Bank, which opened in…
A surprising aspect of modern life in Africa is that, thanks to the telecom deregulations of the early 2000s, cell phones are as pervasive in its Sub-Saharan savannahs as they are in the urban jungles of the United States. More intriguingly still, African mobile network operators (MNOs)…
A few weeks ago, Citi published a quite fascinating 100-page report on financial innovations, from blockchain to P2P lending, in various regions of the world. It’s a highly recommended and very comprehensive reading that I won’t be able to summarize in a short blog post. From this…