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eBay Founder Backs Venture Fund to Fight Extreme Poverty
September, 28 2014
Global - A charitable foundation set up by Pierre Omidyar, the eBay founder, has teamed up with four governments to establish a $200m venture capital fund to support innovation and entrepreneurship in developing countries
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Microfinance Wholesale Market in Sudan
September, 27 2014
Sudan - Sudan introduces the wholesale lending to MFIs via a governmental agency (Wholesale Guarantee Microfinance Agency, Kafalat) to siphon banks’ wholesale finance to MFIs with 75% risk-sharing at a cost of 0,5% of the total loan via restricted Mudarabah contract
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Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI: The Political Economy of Financial Inclusion Policy
September, 25 2014
Global - Many of the players in financial inclusion envision a rich technology-enabled ecosystem in which customers can affordably use electronic means to make payments (inter-operably, of course) and to access savings, credit, and other financial services. However, the experts we talked with, both regulators and providers, do not yet see this vision in reality in any developing country, not even much-hyped Kenya
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5 Sources of Untapped Innovation in Digital Finance
September, 24 2014
Global - Innovators, often in developed markets, are separately piloting powerful new value propositions for customers building on digital channel attributes. Many of these solutions do not target the poor, but the implications can be easily extrapolated to poor and low-income customers
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Brunei: Promoting Micro Insurance a Challenge
September, 23 2014
Brunei - Providing insurance for low-income groups is difficult as it’s challenging to find the correct product that suits their needs, a senior monetary official said yesterday
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IMF Unveils Global Financial Access Survey
September, 21 2014
Global - The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has unveiled the result of its 2014 Financial Access Survey (FAS), which is aimed at mapping the global financial inclusion strategy
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India: PNB Housing to Lend to Women, Self-employed
September, 18 2014
India - According to India’s Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012-2017), the housing shortage in the country is estimated at 58.8 million units. Over 90 per cent of this demand is from low-income households.
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MasterCard and Bansefi to Drive Financial Inclusion in Mexico
September, 18 2014
Mexico - Most of the Mexicans enrolled in this social disbursement program are women who will, for the first time, be able to deposit funds, receive social benefits, save, or engage in many other financial transactions that are facilitated by electronic payments
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India: Cut Rate to Spur Loan Growth - Bankers to RBI
September, 17 2014
India - Amid the banking system’s credit growth slowing to December 2009 levels, lenders have asked the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to cut the repo rate, or the rate at which they borrow from the central bank
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Why Don't Small and Medium Businesses Grow?
September, 15 2014
Global - Enter almost any market in Uganda, Nepal or Peru and you are likely to find streets filled with shops all selling the same items, whether it be rows of tire shops, stores selling the same wooden furniture, or shoe shop after shoe shop. It seems that if some of these firms merged to achieve larger scale, they could make more money
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Cambodia: Sri Lankan Firm Buys Local MFI
September, 15 2014
Cambodia - US-based investment bank Developing World Markets Asset Management (DWM) has sold the controlling stake in Cambodia’s fifth-largest microfinance institution, Thaneakea Phum Cambodia (TPC)
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Kenya: Mobile Plan Lifts Equity Stock Value to an All-Time High
September, 14 2014
Kenya - The ambitious Equity, which is laying ground to launch a new mobile money assault, gained 3.6 per cent on Friday with an intra-day trading high of Sh52.50, pushing its valuation to Sh187 billion. Second placed in the banking sector is KCB, valued at Sh171.6 billion, with its share closing at Sh57.50 or Sh15 billion less than Equity
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Nigeria: The Rise and Rise of Mobile Money
September, 12 2014
Nigeria - Experts believe that if mobile operators are allowed to be in the front seat of mobile money, Nigeria has the mass market to be the leader in mobile money which will lead to an avalanche of technology innovations, job and wealth creation as well as an increase in the contribution of ICT to the GDP.
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Kenya Takes Lead in Booming African Mobile Money Market
September, 12 2014
Kenya - A recent report by the Central Bank of Kenya shows that mobile money transfer service providers moved close to 2 trillion Kenyan shillings (about $23 billion) via 733 million transactions last year alone. That was up from 579 million transactions worth 1.5 trillion shillings in 2012
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Malaysia Becomes the New Global Center of Financial Inclusion
September, 10 2014
Malaysia - Malaysia’s interest in being associated with financial inclusion policy is not only part of the country’s overall strategy to elevate its visibility on international economic issues, but is also reflective of the shifting balance of economic strength toward emerging economies in global policy making
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Tunisia: EIB, BTK to Provide SMEs Up to 92 Million Dinars
September, 09 2014
Tunisia - Houssein Mouelhi, CEO of BTK said the EIB will make available to BTK a credit line in the amount of 20 million Euros (1 euro = 2,2dt) adding that the BTK will also provide, in turn, an additional 20 million Euros for Tunisian SMEs.
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Isabelle Cohen, Research Associate: India - Our Interest in Interest Rates
September, 09 2014
India - Last spring, in the context of a broader study on financial inclusion in rural Tamil Nadu, we piloted and compared three different ways of capturing interest rates in a household survey, to try and understand what sorts of questions would elicit the most accurate responses from households
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Infrastructure Investments Boost Mobile Money in DRC and Ethiopia
September, 09 2014
DR Congo and Ethiopia - A new analysis from Frost & Sullivan titled, Africa Mobile Communications Outlook on the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia, finds that the two markets earned revenues of $1.78 billion in 2013 which is expected to reach $3.27 billion by 2018
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How India Compares on Financial Inclusion Against Other Countries
September, 08 2014
India - The central government’s diktat to open bank accounts for millions of new depositors and give overdrafts to them to push financial inclusion has drawn a lot of flak. But while we may cavil about the choice of method, there’s little doubt that India remains a vastly under-banked country
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Nigeria: Increasing Participation in Insurance
September, 08 2014
Nigeria - In recent years, some initiatives have been introduced into the insurance sector, which are geared towards making it to perform optimally and increase its contribution to the Gross Domestic Product of the country
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Zimbabwe: Mobile Banking Accounting for 85% Retail Sales
September, 07 2014
Zimbabwe - Innovation in the mobile telecommunications sector has pushed the frontiers of local mobile commerce (m-commerce), with mobile banking transactions now accounting for more than 85 percent of total retail transactions, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) has revealed
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Milan Ridge: Bringing Banking to The Poor - A Job Worth Doing
September, 05 2014
Global - India made headlines last week with its ambitious plan to open bank accounts for every household within 12 months. But India is not the only country with a problem to address: across the world, there is a growing need to pull the “unbanked” – nearly half the world’s adults or 2.5bn people – into the formal financial system
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Cambodia: Loan Growth Ready to Take Off
September, 03 2014
Cambodia - Cambodians are forecast to borrow more than double the amount they are borrowing today from microfinance and commercial banking institutions by the year 2020, according to the latest outlook from the Credit Bureau of Cambodia (CBC)
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Nigeria: Cash-Less Policy – Glo Blazes Another Trail
September, 02 2014
Nigeria - About two weeks ago, the company unveiled the GloXchange at a special launch in Lagos. TheGloXchange, which is expected to boost the nation’s cashless policy was launched in partnership with three licensed mobile money agents Firstmonie, Ecobank and IBTC
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Pacific Islands: New UNDP/ UNCDF Facility Offers US$ Five Million in Grants
September, 01 2014
Pacific Islands - The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) today launched a new funding facility, inviting financial service providers to develop new ways of enabling low-income and rural Pacific Islanders to access affordable savings, insurance, credit and other financial services.
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