So Barclays is pulling out of Africa. That’s hugely dispiriting news (or non-news, because it has been trailed for a while) and reflects badly on both Barclays and Africa. It reflects badly on Barclays because it suggests a failure of imagination, over many years, to...
If you’ve ever been to Africa (or even the United States), chances are that you’ve had your finger prints taken on a scanner on the desk at immigration. If you’ve tried to skip the queue at Heathrow, you’ve probably tried to use the facial recognition scanners,...
Artificial intelligence, the rise of the robots, cryptocurrencies? There is lots of excitement about the way that new technologies are expected to revolutionise the banking industry. But when it comes to reducing the cost of sending money abroad, we already have the...
Blog 2 in our series on managing change within insurance providers, in partnership with FSD Africa For insurers to serve a new type of client at scale they must change their modus operandi. The high costs associated with conventional insurance cannot be absorbed by low...
The way we stay in touch, do our shopping, and even the ways in which some of us find love, have all gone digital. Yet, for the vast majority of people sending money home to friends and family in Africa, they are still doing it the way they have always done it: in cash....
Central Bank Governor Dr Patrick Njoroge fielded some tough questions from the audience on 9th February 2017 at FSD Kenya’s annual financial inclusion lecture. British economist, Professor John Kay, had just delivered a provocative talk on the risks of financialization...
Nearly a year ago, we joined the A2ii in Abidjan to sit down with a roomful of regulators to discuss the challenges and imperatives CIMA faces in regulating mobile insurance at the CIMA-A2ii Workshop on Mobile Insurance Regulation. In the CIMA context, as with most...
FSDA’s Director (L), Mark Napier with winners during the awards ceremony. After a period of selection and voting, FSD Africa is pleased to announce overall winners of its 2016 photo competition. The aim, successfully achieved, was to provide examples of how Kenyans...
The significance of developing domestic capital markets as a means of financing priority sectors and driving economic development is increasingly being acknowledged by policy makers in Africa. For instance, the African Union (AU), Agenda 2063, prioritises the development...
Yesterday, Zambia’s central bank announced it had taken over a commercial bank, Intermarket, after the latter failed to come up with the capital it needed to satisfy new minimum capital requirements. Three weeks ago, a Mozambican bank – Nosso Banco – had its...
Earlier in 2016, FSD Africa partnered with the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) and Anjarwalla & Khanna to conduct a regulatory review of different crowdfunding models across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda. This project is now in its final stages and...
