IslamicFinance.de

Nigerian Fintech company Paystack has received an investment of $8 Million from Stripe, Visa, Y Combinator and Tencent. Over the last three years, Fintechs in the country have received funding, and that has increased steadily. Including Flutterwave’s $10 Million there was roughly $100 Million deployed into Fintechs. SureRemit, another Fintech raised $7 Million in an ICO this year. Over the last couple of years, more Nigerian Fintechs are being chosen for Y Combinator. All this activity and traction is also suitably backed by ecosystem players, policy makers and regulators. The rationale behind the investment from the Visa, Stripe and Tencent into Paystack is to help their expansion within Nigeria and to bring financial services to people who have so far been denied the opportunity.

Many Fintech firms have sustainability and social impact at the heart of what they do. For example, Omisego has a Blockchain based use case, focused on Financial Inclusion in South East Asia. They offer users a mobile eWallet that runs on the OmiseGO decentralized exchange (DEX) to send, buy, sell, or trade fiat currencies, digital assets, and cryptocurrencies. Konfio focuses on unsecured SME lending delivered digitally in Mexico. Humaniq was originally based in Africa, and has most of its customers in the continent. The Bio-Id capability that Humaniq developed acts as the stepping stone for many in Sub-Saharan Africa to access financial services. The company has recently hit a key milestone of 400k customers across 16 African nations. BIMA is a Swedish-British startup, focused on providing affordable insurance to consumers in the developing world.

Amazon is planning to provide a product similar to checking accounts to bypass MasterCard and Visa for purchases on its platform. Card issuers stand to lose wallet share, if Amazon can convince people to change payment behaviour and open checking accounts with them for Amazon purchases. The bank of choice will win by growing deposits. It would also mean that smaller ecommerce merchants will need to work harder to attract sales away from Amazon. This strategy doesn’t have to be limited to Amazon and their bank of choice. For example, Amex Shop Small is an attempt at community purchasing mentality with small businesses. However, Amex Shop Small does not help the small business on the fee front. If the new bank account feature is introduced, revenues could be pocketed by Amazon as additional profit, or passed through to merchants to reduce sales fees and payment costs.

In this interview, two product aggregator start-ups, Jirnexu and Fatberry, are discussing their experiences in collaborating with carriers and regulators. Jirnexu is currently in the BNM Regulatory Sandbox and this way gets great support from the regulator. The regulatory sandbox has a customer-focused vision and uses its technology to help with communication, education and purchasing of Insurance. Fatberry is focused on the General Insurance space. It aims at focusing on the customer’s needs and pain points when building its solutions.

In this interview Peter Gross from MicroEnsure talks about Microinsurance and Microfinance. He defines microinsurance as insurance for emerging customers. These types of products are specifically designed for an underserved population that typically can’t get access. MicroEnsure is a specialist provider of Insurance for customers in emerging markets and has registered over 55 million customers in 10 different countries in Asia and Africa. MicroEnsure partners with over 70 different insurers. Their biggest shareholder is AXA, alongside Omidyar Network, IFC and South Africa’s Sanlam. For distribution, the products need to be able to be offered and distributed through the masses. Making an easy to purchase process over mobile or other e-platforms is critical. From an operational perspective, MicroEnsure needs to assume a lot of mistakes on the data input from the consumer. MicroEnsure’s technology is fully API-enabled and can be easily plugged into their distribution partners.

Islamic Finance has seen massive growth since the recession in 2008 as sovereign and institutional investors consider them more stable than the conventional banking system. Fintech has been very popular in the West over the last few years, but the uptake to digitization in the Islamic Finance world has been relatively slow. 2018 is expected to be the year when Islamic Fintech players will start emerging across the world. This has its own challenges, in terms of awareness, regulatory standards across Sharia jurisdictions and product innovation. Islamic Fintech is on the rise in the GCC and Malaysia thanks to various ecosystems and institutions. Bahrain has recetnly launched ALGO Bahrain, the first Fintech consortium specializing in Islamic finance. Eight more regional banks are expected to join in the next 12 months. Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain have all launched their regulatory sandboxes namely Innovation Testing Licence, RegLab, and Bahrain’s regulatory sandbox (expected to be the largest in MENA).

In this article Efi Pylarinou shares a few takeaways from the Impact Summit-Faith in Finance held in Zug, Switzerland. Takeway number 1 is that Finance can become Holistic. Blockchain is the enabler for investing and managing all kinds of Digital Assets. The second takeaway is that Finance can become Holistic through the alignment with Faiths. The conference showcased a diverse selection of SDGs and ventures that are in alignment with the movement. Example ventures include: Equileap, focused on gender diversity, TBLI Group, educating asset managers about impact investing, MicroVest, a wholesale microfinance solution with a Faith alignment, SweetBridge, a blockchain solution for the inefficiencies in the Supply Chain, the Seratio Faith Coin, GoBeyond, angel investing empowering women, ThinkYellow, a gender led investing platform, Symbiotics, financing social SMEs, Kompotoi, the rentable composting toilet and 1Bank4All, the global social bank.