“Q: What is the Lab for Inclusive FinTech and what are your main areas of focus?  A: The UC Berkeley Lab for Inclusive FinTech is a research partnership aimed at unlocking the potential of digital financial technologies to benefit underserved populations around the world. This includes crypto…

The Madojo team, (L-R) Daniel Huang, Victor Okoro and Joshua Iokua Albano, winners of the Binance-LIFT “Blockchain for Social Good” Grand Prize. (Credit: Adam Lau/Berkeley Engineering) “The other big winner of the night was the Madojo team, inventors of a blockchain-certified recruiting pl…

“Mercy Corps Ventures invested in Valiu in 2019 as their product has the potential to make a significant impact, by improving cross-border remittances, savings rates, and even financial inclusion. Now, Valiu and FinX are excited to announce a new pilot in collaboration with Mercy Corps Colombi…

“Just a decade ago, both Artificial Intelligence and Fintechs were fairly new words to the technologically uninitiated. However, in the last decade, they have both had a profound effect on how business, financial transactions, and investments are now being conducted. AI has had such a revoluti…

“Millions of people who have neither mined nor traded a bitcoin are nevertheless paying for bitcoins to exist. That’s because the vast computing power needed to create new bitcoins consumes enormous amounts of electricity and has driven up energy bills for residents and businesses, according…

“[CARE] has teamed up with the Lab for Inclusive FinTech, or LIFT, a soon-to-be-launched initiative of the Institute for Business and Social Impact at UC Berkeley, in its Kenya pilot. LIFT will carry out focus groups to better understand the opportunities for stablecoins, and the partnership …

“Mindful of the risks and focused on the potential, CARE has launched two first-of-their-kind pilots, partnering with leaders in the cryptocurrency movement to deliver crypto-based vouchers to women and groups in Africa and Latin America. The pilots will distribute crypto vouchers to survivors…

“Fintech applications are increasingly disrupting many aspects of everyday life: from how we pay for our coffee to how we trade stocks and apply for a mortgage,” says Professor Paul Gertler, the Li Ka Shing Professor of Economics and faculty director of the Institute for Business and Social Imp…

“There is a general consensus that households in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have insufficient access to credit. Twenty years ago, economists were optimistic that microfinance would fill this void, yet most of the evidence suggests that microfinance loans do not have transformativ…

“While microfinance has not broadly succeeded in relaxing credit constraints for the poor in low- and middle-income countries, a new form of credit using “digital collateral” is effective, a study by Paul Gertler, Brett Green, and Catherine Wolfram finds. Digital collateral allows a perso…