Digital financial services and more importantly, mobile money, have become an important financial innovation to advance financial inclusion in developing and emerging economies. While digital financial services have improved the lives of many Kenyans, to the growing betting segment of the Kenyan...

We investigate how the presence of physical bank branches moderates financial technology diffusion. Our identification strategy uses services suspensions caused by criminal groups that perform hit-and-run raids exploding branch facilities and rendering them inoperable for months. We show that...

The first global cryptocurrency benchmarking study presents a systematic and comprehensive picture of a rapidly evolving industry, illustrating how cryptocurrencies are being used, stored, transacted and mined. The study gathered non-public data from more than 100 cryptocurrency companies and...

Established payment systems play a dominant role also in B2C e-commerce. Innovative payment systems can only be a success here if they pay attention to the particular features of e-commerce, convey the worth of their value-adding unique selling proposition and enjoy the support of established...

The challenges of payment transactions in electronic commerce were initially underestimated, as is now clear in the light of advances in e-commerce, traditional business models are increasingly coming up against their limits. Secure, user-friendly and low-priced innovative payment solutions are...

Since its inception, money has been on the lookout for a credible intrinsic value. In the quest for Intrinsic value, money has been pegged to cattle, gold, other precious metals and so on. But the pegs haven’t held for long. Presently we are in that phase of economic evolution, where money is...

Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) has become a major policy interest among global central banks. However, its introduction faces many challenges including those that are legal, technological and political in nature. In this paper, we summarize those challenges and add a few more that have not...

Mobile Money Systems can be seen as a technological innovation of high impact on developing countries and poorer population segments. They lower transaction costs and facilitate or enable financial transactions that either did not occur before or that were transacted at a higher risk and price....