I really respect The Economist trying to write about Fintech in Africa without focusing on M-Pesa. Usually the narrative about Africa is pretty stale. However; this article focuses on M-Kopa, an asset financing company that started out with solar lamps. M-Kopa’s…
My friend Mbwana told me this at dinner the other night. We were at his favorite Indian restaurant in Nairobi, and I was lamenting the fact that the mobile lending space was getting crowded with new entrants, all who are…
End of the year is here and our office is shutting down on Thursday. At the end of each year I run a retrospective with my team on our accomplishments and failures for that year. In a startup, it’s easy…
M-Shwari is a digital savings and loan product by Safaricom in Kenya. This is the company that was responsible for building M-Pesa. They were tremendously successful with that payment product, and have started moving out of the P2P (peer to…
My friend Mbwana told me this at dinner. We were at his favorite Indian restaurant in Nairobi, and I was discussing the fact that the mobile lending space was getting crowded with new entrants, all who are using android apps.…
Financial regulation in Africa is a hard problem for fintech startups and companies. Regulation is different across the countries in Africa, and different in difficult ways. I think that’s why fintech startups struggle to scale in Africa. They have to…
For hundreds of years banks have been secure from disruption. They’ve maintained economic moats that would make any company jealous, including their access to government liquidity, branch networks, favorable regulation, and credit expertise. Bar some near catastrophic disasters, they’ve managed the…
I’ve just finished Made to Stick by the Heath brothers, and I’m a big fan of how they’ve distilled marketing down into several easy to understand steps. Their acronym – SUCCESs – stands for Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and…
Mobile phones are having a profound impact in Africa, and at the forefront of that is the idea that a phone is also a bank. The reason this is occuring is that the mobile network operators (MNOs) have built…