Information Systems

Kenya has been experiencing a construction boom for the last 15 years. The government has also been investing heavily in infrastructure to improve transport, housing, and technology. Investment by individuals in residential housing has also increased dramatically.   The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics reports that real estate and construction sectors have been the key drivers of Kenya’s’ economic growth for the last ten years contributing 7 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), which indicates that Kenya has a well-developed construction industry. With an increase in population, this trend will only continue and especially for low-cost housing. Numerous challenges exist in the construction sector with the capital being the most significant. To overcome this, Kenyans build privately in a gradual fashion. This approach presents a challenge for homeowners and contractors who cannot plan and price accurately due to the start-stop nature of private home construc...

For established banks that want to expand into the mass market, digital financial services are an obvious choice. What the digital financial services (DFS) strategy and implementation should look like is less given. There are many options in terms of business models, technology and approaches, and it is easy to get lost in a rapidly evolving market environment. Digital financial services have fundamentally changed the financial sector in Sub-Saharan Africa. The number and variety of financial service providers have increased as a new market for affordable and accessible services and products have emerged. Long gone are the days when banks were exclusive buildings on the Main Streets of larger cities only, catering mainly to corporate and wealthy clients. Low-income people, small-scale entrepreneurs and rural populations that were previously considered too risky and too expensive to the bank are now the growth market. This blog focuses on a commercial bank in Africa,  prov...

For the rapidly evolving digital financial services industry, data analytics holds a lot of promise. It can produce necessary business intelligence for service providers to fine-tune product development, sharpen marketing efforts, and improve the strategy to better reach the unbanked. Big data analysis may be particularly useful to better target potential new users. Big data is a big topic. Rarely a day passes without news of innovative applications of the data we all produce through our frequent use of technology. It is also increasingly recognized that effective analysis of large amounts of technology-generated data can support efforts promoting development. By the very nature of the business, the (Digital Financial Services) DFS industry produces a multitude of data that can be helpful in advancing its business goals and financial inclusion. Most DFS providers in Sub-Saharan Africa specifically target the previously unbanked – consumers the financial industry has previously kn...

Introduction In Africa, Digital Financial Services (DFS) providers are making efforts to increase financial inclusion. One of the banks is expanding its presence geographically to reach the unbanked and under-banked; and to this end, carefully planning where to recruit and place agents in various parts of the country.  The bank is specifically targeting areas with low rates of financial inclusion. Having a vast network of effective agents will also allow their branches to focus on higher-value activities, further strengthening their financial ecosystem. A mobile network operator (MNO) is undertaking initiatives to increase the adoption of mobile money among its customers and wants to have measures of the local likelihood of mobile money adoption for each cell tower. In both cases, these institutions have found value in having an interactive map that plots the entities of interests (like concentrations of unbanked individuals) and data associated with those entities (...