Everyone love going out for shopping every so often to buy either basic household commodities or just hanging out with friends in a mall having fun. In rear occasions you might have overspent all your cash in half the things you wanted to buy; or you run out of cash before the party is over! In the past, you would get stranded and end up not buying all the commodities you wanted or leave the party early. However, with growing number of fintech innovations, sending money online for free between users has become a common trend. You now don’t have to leave the party early or drop off some items from your shopping list since your friends from anywhere in the world can sort you out at the very moment when you need them.
Many companies have come up online money transfer and payment solutions that are deepening financial inclusion and enabling you to transact conveniently from whichever place you are in. A good example from the developing world is the Mpesa mobile money transfer that has revolutionized the way people in Kenya do their daily business. A person in the city can earn their salary today and immediately transfer some money to their parents back in the village instantly through their mobile money transfer services. Their parents can then make payment in the nearest shop within the village for basic household commodities like cereals, vegetables among others. All these transactions take place in less than two minutes!
However, Mpesa has its limitations with major challenge being that it is only very popular in the developing world and it has not been fully embraced in our developed countries. In addition, for every money transfer you make through Mpesa, you are usually charged a fee that ranges from 1% to about 4% of the amount being transferred.
That is not to say that we do not have our own fintech solutions in the developed world that facilitate faster and efficient money transfer and payments as and when we need to transact. We have different players in the industry who are positioning themselves strategically and coming up with even much better online money transfer solutions that are more effective and have a global reach. A good example is Bitgold which is revolutionizing online payments.
Bitgold gives the prestige of having a gold account which you open for free and hold gold in it. To purchase gold you use your credit or debit card to transfer the money to your account from which you can now buy gold and be charged only 1% of the spot price. You can also choose to make a wire transfer to your gold account and then buy gold using the cash in your account. Once you have bought gold and you have it in your account, you can then start transacting with it like real money.
You can make payments at the point of sale where they accept MasterCard prepaid cards or transfer the money for free to anyone anywhere in the world within a fraction of a second. All you need to do is to enter the email address and the phone number of the person you want to send the gold to and then click send; within seconds, the recipient will have the money in their Bitgold account. In case you were in a shopping mall and you run out of money, you just need to email your friend and within seconds you will be sorted out of your mess. The beauty about these new innovations that involve gold transfer is they are global and as long as you have the MasterCard prepaid card you can redeem your gold in cash anywhere in the world without restrictions.
Bitgold and Mpesa are just two examples with one from the developed countries and one coming from the developing countries. There are many other fintech start-ups out there working on ensuring that we have a world without boarders when it comes to financial transactions and banking. As days go by, we can only expect more revolutionary solutions to be added into the financial sector and transform what we see today as the normal way of doing business.
