Card and mobile money interoperability critical to empowering African consumers and entrepreneurs
When I founded MFS Africa more than a decade ago, I set a simple measure of success for the business: to facilitate access for my mom's honey business in Porto-Novo, Benin, to collect payments from her customers from across the continent - and to make the process as...
Automation technology is set to redefine the finance industry
The financial services sector is the recipient of dramatic digital transformation, writes Daniel Goldberg, co-founder and CEO of Bridgement. We may be familiar with the more consumer-facing elements such as the proliferation of mobile banking and internet banking, but...
Payment ecosystem must find the commercial carrot to move away from cash
The South African payment ecosystem will need to increase co-operation if it hopes to reduce the country's over-reliance on cash. And, while the regulator still has a big part to play in the solution, flipping the way payments are generally incentivised in favour of...
Millennials and fintechs are redefining financial services
Millennials have received an especially bad reputation in the media over the past decade, characterised as lazy and entitled, and attributed as the reason for the so-called "death" of a number of industries, from the diamond industry to even beer and napkins. By...
Business telephony and CRM platforms are game-changers for insurance companies
Top players in the insurance industry area adopting full-service VoIP, cloud-hosted business telephony and CRM platforms. John Woollam, CEO of Euphoria Telecom, shares five ways this is changing the insurance industry. Higher volume, quicker turnaround Large insurance...
New mindset required for adopting new tech in insurance
According to McKinsey, the tech-enabled insurer of the future will bear little resemblance to the institutions that exist today. By Yunus Scheepers, chief technology officer at SilverBridge Holdings Digitalisation, cloud computing, robotic process automation, and the...
Unlock the power of hyper-personalisation to build more relevant banks
Realtime data and AI have made it possible to deliver curated content, services and products designed for individual customers, but many banks are unable or unwilling to embrace the opportunity offered by hyper-personalisation. There is no doubt that...
Payments processor adumo aims to promote SMME growth
With the consolidation of several leading fintech and payment solutions providers under the name, adumo, the largest independent payments processer in South Africa has been established and aims to promote growth for South Africa's small, medium and micro enterprises...
Data strategy is key to success in financial services
Even though concepts such as DevOps and MLOps have gained support in recent years, FinOps is a relatively new discipline that has yet to become generally practised. And yet, its potential to enhance financial services through a reinvented data strategy is significant....
A minefield of taxes lies ahead for crypto asset transactions
A gain on the disposal of crypto assets may be taxed as either revenue or capital, in line with the same income tax rules that apply to the disposal of shares or unit trust, writes Joon Chong, partner at Webber Wentzel. The gyrations of cryptocurrency markets have...
What do upcoming cryptocurrency regulations mean for your investment?
It was inevitable that, at some point, South African authorities would start regulating cryptocurrencies. While the South African Revenue Service (SARS) has long treated earnings from cryptocurrencies as income tax, the government has made it clear that it believes...
Banks must do more in the face of growing security complexity
As customers demand 24/7 digital access to banking in the post-pandemic reality, fraud and security breaches have become top of mind in this interconnected environment. By Ria Pinto: GM and technology leader of IBM South Africa For the financial services industry, the...