Digital wallets have revolutionised the financial services industry by providing instant and convenient payment to consumers.
In many countries, digital wallets have democratised payments, by enabling everyone – unbanked or banked to use these services. Consequently, digital wallets have seen mass adoption globally. According to Juniper Research, there were 2.6 billion unique digital wallet users globally in 2020, which will increase to 4.4 billion by 2025.
In emerging economies of Africa, Asia Pacific and Latin America, digital wallets were introduced with the primary objective of increasing financial inclusion. Digital wallets met this objective to a great extent by bringing unbanked people into the formal financial ecosystem through pervasive digital channels like mobile phones and today in many countries digital wallet penetration far exceeds bank penetration.
Digital wallets have provided easy-to-use, quick and cost-effective money transfers, payments, savings and micro-loans services to the unbanked people, fulfilling their basic financial needs. With the key objective of financial inclusion on track, digital wallets are now evolving from financial inclusion to financial enrichment.
Digital wallet providers are now moving beyond basic payment use cases to more sophisticated investment use cases such as stock trading, crypto asset trading, gold trading etc. In this article, we will look at some of the recently launched investment services on popular digital wallets from three continents. Colombia: MOVII Enabling Crypto Asset Purchase and Sale
Government of Colombia’s Ministry of Finance & Public Credit in 2014 introduced ‘Financial Inclusion Law’, under which it allowed the creation of Companies Specialised in Electronic Payments and Deposits (Sociedades Especializadas en Depósitos y Pagos Electrónicos’ abbreviated as SEDPE).
The objective of SEDPEs is to increase financial inclusion by enabling unbanked people to open low-balance financial accounts quickly through digital channels like the mobile phone with minimum documents.
Leveraging Financial Inclusion Law, the first SEDPE launched in Colombia was MOVII in 2018. MOVII is Colombia’s first completely digital wallet where everything from customer on-boarding to payments is done digitally using a mobile phone.
MOVII allows anyone in Colombia over the age of 12 to download MOVII mobile app and open a digital wallet account to transfer money, get loans, receive financial aid, pay bills, make merchant payments, recharge mobile connections and buy digital content etc. MOVII has over 2 million people using its digital wallet.
In April 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Colombia, the Government of Colombia partnered with MOVii to disburse solidarity income (financial aid) to economically […]