12 Mar Is Libra Gone and Forgotten and What Could be the Impact on South African Online Payments?
I know it seems like Libra’s gone away for the moment as a potential global currency of the internet, but has it really? While it’s still tackling its legal challenges around the globe, a talk at Blockchain Africa gave some interesting perspectives on its evaluation as a currency for introduction in South Africa. I thought this might be interesting for our multinational eCommerce companies when considering future key African payment methods for acceptance at the checkout. Guest speaker Hemash Kala highlighted some opportunities and threats of the introduction of Libra into the South African environment. This is part of a worldwide ongoing battle between government and public money. South Africa has a financial inclusion level of 89% with a relatively sophisticated financial sector. Roughly 5m (15% of the population) is unbanked, most of whom live in rural areas. Half of the banked South Africans don’t use the their bank card for payments and just draw their salary in cash. With the backing of facebook’s 2.7bn users, Libra could seriously disrupt the financial services sector with its benefits of a stable store of value, peer-to-peer, wide-reaching, cross border, mobile and internet payment capability at a low cost of digital cash adoption. The threats to the central and commercial banking environment would be significant if Libra succeeds and Libra will be a significant risk in terms of capital flight (in preference to holding of local currency), loss of control of money supply, opportunity for crimes, and fuelling of impostor scams. It’s still a way off, but the war between government and public money is on. This is part of our ongoing research in keeping an eye on payment developments for our multinational eCommerce merchants to ensure that we have the most relevant payment options at the checkout across Africa. If you are a multinational eCommerce company expanding to or across Africa, click here to get paid at the checkout with card and mobile money by more than half a billion Africans. Thank you for inspiration and content to Hemash Kala of Beansprout Technologies Our African Payment Solutions services include:
