| Mastercard And Unileverâs Micro-Lending Has Macro Results For Kenyan SMBs Mastercard and Unilever have expanded the rollout of their digital lending platform for SMBs in Kenya, who before only had the cash on hand to buy inventory. Carlos Menendez, president, enterprise partnerships, Mastercard, tells Karen Webster how interest-free loans help these SMBs buy the supplies that their customers want â and increase their sales by as much as 20 percent. Itâs why Menendez said that Mastercard plans to expand the program fourfold and touch 20,000 SMBs by the end of this year. |
| FitPay CEO: Tokenization And Wearables Mean Identities Are Our Data Beyond the fitness tracker, wearables are catching on. Get ready for the device as data conduit, as a tracker of different sorts, from patient information to logistics for manufacturing firms. In the latest Topic TBD, FitPay CEO Mike Orlando tells Karen Webster the stage is set for universal tokens and new paradigms of consumer control over who knows what about them, and when. |
| CO-OP President: Shared Branching And Credit Union Service Ubiquity Itâs been said that credit unions deliver great service, but only as far as their local footprint takes them. CO-OPâs new president of shared branching, Jim Hanisch, says shared branching gives credit unions and their members access to the same national footprint as even the largest national banks. Hereâs how he said this shared banking concept gave birth to CO-OPâs creation of the largest national banking footprint, second only to Wells Fargoâs. |
| | Facebook’s Monetization Strategy | | Facebook And Dating: Itâs (Not) Complicated Jaws dropped, and so did dating app stock prices, when Facebook said it would become a dating site. Karen Webster says that Facebookâs move is about leveraging the âRelationship Statusâ information that was part of a userâs profile from the start â and its trusted friends of friends of friendsâ network taps into how people most want to meet their perfect match. Hereâs why she says dating sites should be worried, why dating could be Facebookâs monetization trifecta and how it could even ignite the payments and commerce ambitions that have so far eluded them. |
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