Digitization is the most significant revolution in banking. The banking process is now speedier and more reliable than before. Document and record maintenance and retrieval have become considerably faster and easy. The basic banking system is also improved by digital banking.
Along with the rise of nontraditional fintech services and challenger banks, many of the most open banking services have become stand-alone solutions. Banks frequently act as a connecting point between their customers and other service providers.
While some banks and credit unions have chosen to begin this mobile-first transition with a comprehensive core conversion, others have discovered that modular banking is less expensive, faster, and easier to implement. A modular approach allows companies to adapt faster to change and implement new strategies. There are many aspects of the traditional legacy banking system that becomes obsolete and too expensive and slow to be feasible allowing opportunities for fintech’s. Something as simple as changing from a fixed interest rate to a variable rate for a traditional bank can be time consuming compared to a fintech where it is nothing more than a line of coding.
Given the restrictive nature of the banking industry, some banks believe that the concept of gamification in banking is inappropriate and non-viable. Others, however, have realised that banking should not be so strict. With this in mind, they set out to investigate the possibilities for using game mechanics in the banking industry. A great example of gamification in banking is the usage of QR codes which benefits includes reduction in training time of merchants, easy and quick as it is contactless, linked to bank account and ensures no cloning of cards. Unlike barcodes, Quick Response codes are 2D with information horizontally and vertically being able to read from any angle. QR codes allows for lower cost of deployment compared to POS/NFC devices and have no need to share CVV numbers.
MOBU’s CEO Juan Engelbrecht has presented in over 30 countries his approach and insights to the future of banking and digital securities and in the process shared some valuable insights on the state of the African financial services sector. They have launched their own exchange of monetary value or digital currency to be used in several real-world businesses as a more efficient way to transact as the average cross-border transaction in Africa is around 16% in fees. MOBU intends to upgrade their currency to be 300 times faster than bitcoin and 10 times faster than SWIFT in terms of transactions per second. MOBU is currently trading on Cielo exchange owned by one of Asia`s largest gaming companies called Asibimo.
Africa receives less than 1% of worldwide venture capital investments, which total more than $100 billion. Unbanked adults account for 34% of the adult population in Africa, accounting for a significant portion of the global unbanked population. As a result, the world's second-largest continent, which has 1.3 billion people and 950 million mobile phone subscribers, is chronically neglected. Bitcoin as a store of wealth has progressively gained favor as a result of volatile, restricted, and failing currencies, with Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa having the third, fifth, and sixth biggest numbers of Bitcoin holders per capita, respectively.
Given its first-mover advantage MOBU not only intends to use their world class blockchain or exchange of monetary value but also integrate with the banking system in the form of new technology called RPP(Rapid Payment Program) issued by Bankserv(ACH) that allows real-time transfers between different banks at lower fees via direct debits.
Wrap-up
MOBU's goal is to become the world's cheapest payment solution, and we eagerly await their game-changing innovation. The MOBU currency has the potential to become Africa's currency because it has all of the characteristics of a perfect monetary value exchange, focusing on both high volume and low value transactions, and it is one of the few truly scalable blockchains. A secure network allowing almost real-time transacting with remarkable low fees.