Last week I saw this post at
Takis Mag
“Your kids will not know what money is,” Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, told U.K. broadsheet The Daily Telegraph in November 2015, predicting that cash itself will disappear within a generation. To be precise: when today’s university students have children. About ten, twelve years?
The article is very good and contains some comments I believe to be very important.
one of them being Yu E Bao, a node of Jack Ma’s Alibaba empire. Their offering Yu E Bao allows customers to have surplus cash invested for them—in low-risk securities—at a 6% annual return rate, double what a physical bank can offer. Yu E Bao is really a money market fund, not a bank deposit. However, for customers there is little difference. And since Alibaba itself is not taking the liquidity risks, it doesn’t need a banking license, neatly avoiding the heavy regulation levied on the industry by central banks. Nonetheless, this a “gray area.” No denying it.
A Reuters Breakingviews report from February entitled “Lend and Pretend,” by John Foley, explains why: “Alibaba isn’t a bank. But for customers it’s getting hard to tell the difference. Users of China’s dominant e-commerce website can now deposit funds, make investments, take out loans and even give out gifts of virtual cash…. Banks typically offers savings, loans and transactions…. Alibaba’s foray into finance has seen it target all three…. While Alibaba doesn’t have a bank’s lending expertise, it does have masses of data on borrowers’ transaction habits.” China’s Amazon.com equivalent had made 170 million yuan worth of loans by February 2015, mainly to small- and mid-size companies on its Taobao marketplace.
Does any of this sound familiar? Anything posted on this blog that this reminds you of? No? Maybe this will help:
If you use an iPhone there’s a good chance you will adopt an Apple banking service sometime, one that might resemble a PayPal lite—the account without the bank transfers. Apple is superbly well positioned to reap the rewards from our cell phones turning into mini banks. It manufactures the hardware, software, and—crucially—the security and identification capabilities that virtual banking will require.
No? Well go refresh your memory about
Mpesa In essence the "future of money" is already happening in Africa. Kenya to be exact. One thing you'll note in the 60 minutes piece is the resistance of European countries to adopt MPesa. Now when you read the above you understand why. If an African company owned this space by virtue of international patents on the process, MPesa and by extension Africa would profit greatly on this. This, my friends is real deal White Supremacy. Not that BS the BLM movement is ranting about. My gut says that these big players are watching MPesa, or have watched MPesa and are busy trying to determine how they can implement it worldwide and cut MPesa out or at a minimum keep it a small player where it's customers would be siphoned off into non-African systems in part by making (or maintaining) things like ApplePay as aspirational signifiers of digital wealth. Lets look at more from the article:
The benefits are real: Metro opens accounts and mints fresh plastic debit cards for new clients in 30 minutes (versus five to 10 working days).
MPesa has no need for debit cards. It leverages the phone the client already owns and the cellular network already in existence. +5 for MPesa.
What Apple, and Android, possess is ownership of the consumer at the moment he/she makes mobile purchases. Who needs bank branches and marathon phone-call holding times when Siri’s able to pay a bill for you instantly? Competition lies in the form of digital-only banks, also primed for mobile users, like Germany’s Fidor: a well-established lender, with plans to enter the U.S. market stymied by obstructed access to the big payment systems owned by big U.S. banks. Money is already a turf war, even in cyberspace
Notice the total lack of mention of MPesa. Never mind it was featured on 60 minutes not long ago. I do hope that the people running MPesa understand that the competition is collaborating to leave it out of the market.
The article goes on to discuss Bitcoin. Honestly I haven't spent time researching or using it. However I believe that MPesa could easily be modified to use or include 'coin.
But getting back to my point. MPesa is already here for Africans. In this future of digital money, Africa could take an even more commanding, though largely invisible lead in this change. It would behoove the governments all across Africa to stop being short and non-sighted and aggressively seek to expand it's use before the European and Asian financial giants step in and take over.
