Every countries currency is its identity. As time goes by technology is taking the place of money gradually with Financial Technology (Fintech) innovations driving this change. Financial Technology or FinTech is a relatively new term that applies to any emerging technology that helps consumers or financial institutions deliver financial services in newer, faster ways than using brick and mortar. Financial Technologies (Fintech) now permeates almost every aspect of our society including how we run business. FinTech tools are now bring a lot of innovations leading to gradual replacement of physical money. These financial technologies vary in types and function including mobile banking, mobile payments and crypto currency are elaborated in this article.
Mobile Banking
Mobile banking involves having financial transactions done on a mobile device such as feature and smart phones as well as tablets. It’s includes clients paying bills on their phones or sending or receiving money using their mobile devices, or a financial institution sending usage activities to clients’ devices. Mobile banking brings to the table stronger financial convenience and ease of doing transactions electronically. Therefore, most financial institutions are now adopting or expanding their capabilities in electronic space to meet the rising demand for mobile banking. Most banks now offer some type of mobile banking capability on their platform including account information access, transactions, investments, support services and self-service.
Mobile Payments
The mobile payment systems can trace its history to the world’s first phone-based banking service launched by the Merita bank of Finland in 1997 anchored on SMS. The game changer in mobile money services took place in March 2007 when M-Pesa was first launched in Kenya mobile network operator Safaricom ( part of Vodafone group). As time passed, the mobile payment systems kept on getting better. By 1999, users are able to buy movie tickets from our mobile device. Currently, Booking flights, buying online, paying back loans, sending money to friends and family is mostly done via mobile money services. A society moves from cash-based to an increasingly digital one such as mobile money services, they are able to do a lot more services using their mobile devices. There are a host of players in the market today including Zee pay, Google Pay, Samsung Wallet, Apple Wallet, and MTN Mobile Money Wallet among others.
Crypto currency & Blockchain
Cryptocurrencies use cryptographic protocols, or extremely complex code systems that encrypt sensitive data transfers, to secure their units of exchange. Crypto currency exchanges have been able to connect users buying or selling crypto currencies such as bitcoin. The legal status of crypto currencies varies substantially from country to country whereas some countries have regulations for it, others do not permit its usage in their countries and some other countries are working on regulatory regimes to deal with it. However, cryptocurrency is now the norm and around the world there are a lot of persons using it as a means for payments.
In conclusion, FinTech is here to stay and it is helping our society reach the goal of becoming cashless one where consumers and businesses stay to benefits from secured and convenience ways of payments.