Browsing: Nedbank

Last week’s purchase by Visa of Cape Town-based mobile payments company Fundamo in a US$110m all-cash deal demonstrates clearly how the race is on to provide electronic financial services using cellphones, especially in emerging markets

Cellular network operator Vodacom may seek its own banking licence from SA regulators if its mobile transactions platform, M-Pesa, takes off in the way it expects it will in the next few years. Vodacom launched M-Pesa in SA last year

Where will the money come from? This is the key question arising from confusion over cabinet’s decision to “support” — as opposed to authorise — a proposed additional R20bn for power utility Eskom.

A bubble similar to the dot-com mania of the late 1990s is inflating in the mobile payments industry in SA. And many of companies are going to be hurt when it bursts. That’s the view of Standard Bank director Herman Singh

Vodacom expects to sign up 10m M-Pesa mobile money users within three years. The telecommunications operator’s director in charge of the product’s launch, Romeo Kumalo, revealed the ambitious target during the product’s launch in Midrand, north of Johannesburg, on Tuesday.

Cellphone group Vodacom and its partner, financial services firm Nedbank, will launch M-Pesa, Kenya’s wildly popular money transfer service, in SA at the end of August. The two companies have set 31 August as the date for the product’s official SA launch.