I had a most en”lightning” pop in to a friend of mine who has built a bitcoin ATM or coin-vending machine that accepts coins in exchange for satoshis issued on the lightning network to the wallet of your choice. Thank you to Matt of https://twitter.com/21isenough. What a novel concept, which initially I thought was for fun, but now having seen it, could have some fantastically widespread impacts on adoption of crypto and feeder technologies for paym...
My friend Antony Lewis just wrote an insightful article on CBDCs and how similar they might be to cash. With his hypothesis in mind, I want to explore how CBDCs might impact online payments across Africa
Antony suggests that cash and CBDCs differ in three important ways and that is Accessibility, Anonymity and Interest.
To start with “Accessibility” - cash is ubiquitous and anyone can get and give it without having to do any registrat...
eCommerce is surviving and thriving across Africa and the main hubs to start with are Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. They each have their anomalies and we will explain a little about each of them.
Nigeria is a highly regulated market when it comes to payments and businesses like betting, forex and online gambling. It has a very well developed payments system dominated by scheme cards and a card called Verve, and bank transfer as a result o...
Talking Africa and payments - Africa is becoming a dynamically interesting place for eCommerce businesses to explore and evolve. I have had a few recent conversations that give us an idea of how the African payments landscape could radically change. Africans are very accomplished mobile users and love money and digitalisation.
I had an interesting breakfast with two cryptopreneurs.
Matt https://twitter.com/21isenough has built a coin vending m...
The Ukraine Ministry of Digital Transformation has signed an MOU with Binance to better understand regulation and to establish a digital currency market in their country. It is really tough for governments to come to terms with the degradation of the current fiat and accounting / record keeping system which is fast becoming legacy and how to embrace the new way of being with blockchain, smart contracts and digital currencies that is going to completely transfo...
More about Jack of Twitter and Square who is coming to live with us for a few months to better understand Africa and Africans from an online payment’s perspective. Jack’s visit is big news - he is a very accomplished thought leader when it comes to fintech with Twitter and paytech with Square. He kindly shared his insights on global payment trends with Quartz Africa.
Square has been really progressive for example with the implementa...
Bill and Melinda’s social venturing for financial inclusion is investing in paytech with the intention of connecting 320m more Africans to digital financial services, one success being Mowali that came out of Mojaloop.
Zuk and Co are investing in hubs and the man himself did an African tour way back to visit the homeland of his 140m fans, most of whom use Facebook on their mobile. Frustrated with the progress of Libra, here comes Facebook Pa...
The local demand for eCommerce and the high level of venture capital and private equity investment in African eCommerce companies is driving the growth of eCommerce logistics across Sub-Saharan Africa which is in turn driving online payments by African payment providers.
The large eCommerce companies have been driving a unique industry of logistics and product delivery that suits the lack of infrastructure across Africa. eCommerce is expected to grow t...
Big techs and fintechs are coming together and leveraging each others platforms, consumers and licenses for payments. It’s not easy for big techs to get banking licenses and easier to partner with banks to roll out compliant products
Big techs are going big when it comes to money . . Facebook with its stalling Libra crypto-venturing has in the meantime rolled out FacebookPay, Uber is issuing cards, Amazon’s coming out with BillPay. The...
