Welcome to the last week of our course. This week, we will finally get to meet some of the amazing entrepreneurs and innovators that make FinTech such an exciting field to be in. You will learn how successful entrepreneurs position themselves in the competitive landscape, and how their companies are delivering value to their customers. We start the week by discussing some of the most successful FinTech applications; peer-to-peer lending and remittances. First, peer-to-peer lending is playing an increasingly important role in emerging markets, especially in China. Rather than trying to get a loan from a bank, many small and medium enterprises are now turning to retail investors directly, and borrow from their peers. Traditionally, it is the role of banks to overcome information asymmetries between an entrepreneur and investors through careful screening and evaluation of good investment opportunities. The key idea of peer-to-peer lending is that this function, the selecting of good investment opportunities can also be done collectively by a group of retail investors. Peer-to-peer lending markets have grown significantly over the past years, and a large number of platforms around the world that will make it easier for entrepreneurs to get credit. The second big application of FinTech in emerging markets are remittance payments. Remittances used to be extremely expensive and cumbersome. For many people in emerging markets, this has posed a massive problem since they are supporting their families in another country, and regularly have to send money home. With payments being too expensive and too cumbersome, many resort to carrying relatively large sums of cash whenever they traveled home to see their family. This exposes them to the risk of being robbed along the way. A flurry of innovative startups in emerging markets found ways to provide the same service at a much lower cost and more conveniently. This week, you will learn how exactly they have done that. The third use case for FinTech in emerging markets you will learn about in this course can be summarized as the creation of new asset classes. Traditionally, it has been difficult to manage informal savings clubs, which are very popular in South Africa, not only in the rural areas. In such savings clubs, like-minded group of people, the proverbial mates who work in the same street, come together and everyone saves a small amount every month. Every now and again one of the members gets the entire pot to do a larger purchase. Some of these clubs provide loans but the basic idea is always the same. You save money within a community and distributed according to your own roots within the community. One of the big challenges in this area so that the savings clubs are difficult to manage, the bookkeeping can be quite cumbersome and difficult, and unfortunately, every now and again there's fraud or disputes over who has gotten what. So, in this course, you will learn about StokFella, a South African FinTech startup that is providing new information, and therefore making it easier for people to invest in these informal savings. So, StokFella is helping to create stock thoughts. How informal savings clubs accordance with South Africa as a new asset class. What is best of all, you will actually meet all these amazing entrepreneurs. We will speak with Onie Patenfuller, one of the trailblazers for impact investing in South Africa. She will tell us more about the amazing use cases where FinTech is applied to improve the livelihoods of thousands and even millions of people in emerging markets. You will get to meet Tshepo Moloi, the CEO of StokFella, who will tell us about the importance of informal savings in South Africa, and what StokFella is doing to improve the sector. So, we will bring everything back to what we have learned in the course before. We will talk with innovators in the financial services industry about how FinTech is changing their industry. You will meet Naomi Snyman from Standard Bank, one of the largest banks in South Africa, who's chairwoman for the South African financial blockchain consortium. Naomi will tell us about why she thinks blockchain will disrupt the banking sector. You will then meet Steward Fandavin and artist Rum Karan, who work at the blockchain disruption team at Nedbank, another one of our large banks. They will tell us about the innovation happening with index. Finally, we will meet Farzam Ezani, who just took the exciting step of leaving a big financial company to start his own venture called Valor. At the end of the course, we will meet Proof of Stake, a group of young entrepreneurs from UCT who started to create their own FinTech company that will create cattle on the block chain, and enable investment into an asset class that is ultimately African, and has been plagued by informational asymmetries. Now, please join me as we take the next step into the exciting world of FinTech innovation.
