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How the Underbanked Can Prosper from Going Cashless

How the Underbanked Can Prosper from Going Cashless

This article summarizes the main takeaways from a keynote address by Ed McLaughlin, chief emerging payments officer for MasterCard, at the Wharton Social Impact Conference. During his presentation McLaughlin noted the work SASSA and MasterCard were doing to boost financial inclusion in South Africa. The South Africa Social Security Agency (SASSA), and MasterCard, with McLaughlin leading the company’s development and commercialization of payment product platforms, had distributed more than 10 million of the debit cards to South Africans. That nation’s banked population, according to the survey FinScope South Africa 2013, had grown by 8% since 2012. Seventy-five percent (27.4 million) of the adult population now are banked, meaning they have accounts with a mainstream financial institution. The survey attributed to the SASSA debit cards the addition of 1.9 million people in 2013 to the banked population.

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