AS MARKETING COUPS go, getting your logo onto more than 100m national-identity cards takes some beating. MasterCard is about to pull off this branding feat as Nigeria’s electronic ID and payment card, currently being piloted, is introduced nationally. Providing financial services to customers who previously had no access to them is another side to fintech, often starting with payments.
Globally, an estimated 2.5 billion people—over half the adult population—lack bank accounts. This financial exclusion leaves the poor relying on informal ways of saving (eg, cash under the mattress) or borrowing (eg, exorbitantly priced payday lenders). Development experts used to try to get banks to open branches in out-of-the-way places. Now they gush about bank-free finance, based on mobile payments or ID-based schemes of the sort Nigeria is bringing in.
In Africa, only one in four people has a bank account but eight in ten have access to a mobile. An early fintech success was M-Pesa, a Kenyan phone-based payments scheme launched in 2007 by Safaricom, a telecoms group. By knitting together a network of agents selling airtime into something akin...
from The Economist: Special report http://ift.tt/1H1NbtQ
No comments:
Post a Comment