There is tremendous opportunity for Facebook to go after payments in places like Latin America, Asia and Africa.

Facebook could partner with local businesses as a point of presence. Customers would give their money to a nearby retailer, who would add money to the customer’s Facebook account. People who need cash could come in and take cash from the retailer. Facebook could also work with a local mobile operator, which already has such a retail network network.

Do men make better entrepreneurs than women? Not according to a recent policy paper from the US-based Kauffman Foundation, which found that women entrepreneurs bring particular sets of skills that not only set them apart from their male counterparts but lend themselves to success in business.

AFTER the launch of agricultural value-chain financing last October, banks have begun using this tool to boost their risk-mitigated lending to the agriculture sector. But the journey seems to be long and arduous.
Right now, the bulk of value-chain financing (VCF) is concentrated in crop-growing and animal farming, as it is easier for banks to identify and classify value-chain partners (VCPs) and commodity or input suppliers who act as guarantors for the farmers.

In Turkey almost all businesses are micro, small or medium-sized enterprises (MSME), and only 0.1 percent of businesses are large firms, according to the Turkey Agency for Statistics.

William Mougayar is a Toronto-based angel investor and four-time entrepreneur who advises startups on strategy and marketing. In the first of this three-part series, he discussed how banks dealt with the emergence of the Internet and how blockchain technology is causing these institutions a whole new headache. Here, in part two, he looks at why and how banks should start embracing blockchain technology.

In India, as in many parts of the world, a woman is considered to be a homemaker first. According to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Gender Gap Report 2014, Indian women spent an average of 352 minutes per day on unpaid work (men spent 52).

The developing world is increasingly using mobile banking apps to move money, but new research shows those apps are often poorly coded and pose security risks.

Researchers with the University of Florida looked at dozens of apps used for mobile money systems but extensively analyzed seven that have millions of users in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines.

Credit guarantee schemes provide third-party credit risk mitigation to lenders by absorbing a portion of the losses on the loans made to SMEs in case of default, in return for a fee. CGS are popular partly because they combine a subsidy element with market-based arrangements for credit allocation. This allows less room for distortions in credit markets, unlike more direct forms of intervention, such as state-owned banks.

Credit guarantee schemes are present in more than half of developing countries. Their numbers are growing.

William Mougayar is a Toronto-based angel investor and four-time entrepreneur who advises startups on strategy and marketing.
Here, in the first of a three-part series, he discusses how banks dealt with the emergence of the Internet and how blockchain technology is causing these institutions a whole new headache.

Digital disruptors are attacking the banking industry, redefining customer expectations and reshaping industry boundaries. From competitors to customers, processes to people, banking executives who want to lead in a digital economy need to make fundamental changes to how they operate. As one of the world’s largest banks acknowledges: “we must change our execution model to be digital.”