Blog

A robust foundation has been built since mobile money began in 2007, and it seems digital payments will continue to gain traction in 2015. The closing plenary by Bill Gates at the October 2014 SIBOS conference for 7,000 financial industry professionals worldwide was about the potential of digital finance to promote financial inclusion, reduce poverty and promote women’s empowerment. And according to the GSMA’s State of the Industry report, there were 219 live mobile money platforms in 2013. By October 2014, this number had already increased to 251, with over 100 more in the pipeline. But for digital finance to really expand throughout Africa, MENA, Asia and Latin America this year, it needs greater uptake in rural areas. And though it ’s being used to facilitate transactions for health care, education, clean cookstoves, water, solar power and lanterns, and any number of financial products, the only sector with the transactional volume to economically justify the creation of this new payments channel at scale in rural areas is agriculture. Therefore, to leverage the potential of agriculture as a gateway to serving other village-level mobile finance needs, we must think about how best to strategically insert digital finance into the agriculture value... Read More

In 2007, the same year that the pioneering M-Pesa in Kenya was launched, another, lesser-known digital payments system was started in Colombia. In partnership with the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation, the Bank of Bogota launched Cedula, a smartcard digital payments initiative that was meant to be a digital channel through which the federation would pay its 574,000 coffee farmers for their beans. A traditional agriculture cooperative, the federation provides agriculture extension services (knowledge transfer) and technical assistance as well as purchases coffee beans on behalf of its coffee farmers – the pride of Colombia’s agricultural economy. A key function of the federation – or any agriculture cooperative – is the transfer of knowledge to farmers about good agriculture practices in a wide range of areas, including better production quantity/quality, better post-harvest handling, agriculture marketing and much more. Within its scope as an agriculture cooperative, the federation sought to leverage the membership ID card of member farmers by partnering with the Bank of Bogota and converting it to the Cedula magnetic strip smartcard. The federation deserves credit for its visionary pursuit of this digital payments mechanism that it initiated in 2007 – the same year that the pioneering M-Pesa in Kenya... Read More