| Africa | Uber set to launch Uber Cash in Africa. Uber, the global ride-hailing giant has partnered with Flutterwave, an African payments company, to launch Uber Cash. Uber Cash is a digital wallet on the Uber app that will allow customers to pay for trips by topping up the digital wallet via card or mobile money. Uber Cash is expected to significantly reduce the volume of cash and P2P transactions between drivers and riders. TechCrunch |
| | EDITOR'S NOTE | Digital wallets typically orient value along two vectors: ubiquity and utility. Uber has, for the most part, achieved the former but might have see limited adoption if the wallet is tied to a single service. Therefore, it is expected that Uber will try to add on more services (UberEats, P2P transfers maybe) to their platform in the future in order to provide more value and in turn capture more customer spend. This will set Uber on a 'super-app' path that would allow it to compete with the other digital wallets like OPay and it will be interesting to see how that plays out. |
|
|
|
| South Africa | LifeQ partners with 1Life to launch 1Life Pulse. LifeQ, a global digital health and biometrics company, has partnered with 1Life, SA-based insurer, to launch 1Life Pulse, a biometric-based lifestyle and insurance product. 1Life Pulse will leverage VeoSense, a health monitoring application developed by Samsung and LifeQ that tracks and analyses users' health metrics using Samsung's wearable devices. When users sign up for 1Life Pulse, they're given a Samsung Galaxy Active tied to their 1Life policy number. The customers are now able to track and improve their vitals in exchange for additional insurance cover. Disrupt Africa |
| | EDITOR'S NOTE | This data-driven approach to underwriting and operating life insurance is a pretty interesting development in Africa. Incentivising positive health and lifestyle changes with insurance benefits could potentially allow 1Life develop a healthy and more valuable insurance portfolio in Africa's biggest insurance market. |
|
|
|
| Kenya | What is the effect of Uber Cash on drivers' cashflow in Kenya? Following the launch of Uber Cash, Michael Kimani (@pesa_africa) maps the current Uber payment ecosystem in Kenya and the implication of the newly announced digital wallet on their drivers' cash flows. In this Twitter thread, he compares the flow of rider payments before and after the introduction of Uber Cash and argues that it will eventually displace the riders as the first point of payment. Twitter |
|
|
|
| Africa | Raise launches crowdfunding platforms for African startups. Raise, a Kenyan-based end-to-end digital fundraising platform for African startups, has launched the public beta version of their platform. Raise enables investors and founders to facilitate virtual deal discussions and agreements and has seen over $20million in transactions on the platform. Disrupt Africa |
| | EDITOR'S NOTE | We expect to see more tools like this to gain increased adoption during this COVID-19 period which has restricted intercontinental travel and forced traditionally in-person functions to go online. |
|
|
| South Africa | South Africa's TruID, lands undisclosed funding from CrossFin Ventures. TruID, has received an undisclosed sum of funding from CrossFin Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on fintech investing. TruID provides businesses (typically other fintechs) with direct access to customers' banking information. Ventureburn |
|
|
|
Share a tip | Do you have an announcement, event, or job posting you'd like to share, or have you come across an interesting bit of African fintech news recently? Hit reply and let me know! I might be able to include it in next week's newsletter. |
|
Know someone who'd enjoy Decode Fintech? |
|
|
|
|
