The financial services industry around the world has been transformed by technology-enabled financial services—known as fintech. This disruptive technology is reshaping financial products,…

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has a fixation with subsidizing consumer goods, particularly water, food, and energy. Subsidies are often introduced to protect the poor and…

Technology-based payment service providers—payment fintechs—have disrupted payment market transformationally and are entering the credit market. PayPal and Square are the most prominent examples…

From plastic pollution to remittance flows, climate change to digital technology, human capital to road safety, we look back at the past year and highlight some of the most popular blogs from 2021…

Fintech is not (yet) making good on its promise: there is a sizable “fintech gender gap.” While 29% of men in the survey use fintech, only 21% of women do – a gap of 8 percentage points (pp).

The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic has galvanized governments around the world to develop rescue and recovery packages to support small businesses at a scale never seen before. The US…

Although there are no national statistics in Burundi indicating how widespread child marriage is, numerous cases are reported all over the country. But does this necessarily mean that child…

Access to basic financial services help the poor increase their incomes and become more resilient.

a longer version of this blog post is available on the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative platform With Google Trends data showing that searches for the word “blockchain” have…