Wednesday, November 27African Digital Business Magazine

Tech

The Human Touch: Biometrics Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
Fintech, Tech

The Human Touch: Biometrics Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

By Christian Fredrikson, CEO, Fingerprints For thousands of years, humanity has used fingers to express itself. Crossing one’s index and middle fingers in the West means good luck, India’s intricate hand mudras indicate everything from no fear to reverence, and a thumb down signalled bad news for Rome’s gladiators. Today, however, we’re doing even more with our fingers. From accessing mobile devices to authorizing payments, the use of fingers - in particular, our fingerprints - has grown rapidly. So rapidly in fact that in May 2019, we announced that we had shipped 1 billion fingerprint sensors worldwide. But how did we get here, and where do we go next? Authentication is dead, long live authentication It’s a funny coincidence ‘PIN’ and ‘pain’ are only one letter apart. For years, PIN aut...
Biometric payments – forget sensor size, focus on performance
Fintech, Tech

Biometric payments – forget sensor size, focus on performance

By Jonas Nilsson, Product Manager at Fingerprints Biometric authentication has come a long way in recent years. Launched in the first Android smartphone almost five years ago, fingerprint touch sensors have quickly overtaken PIN as consumers’ preferred authentication method. Now, demand for the same level of security and seamless UX is growing across other payments form factors like smartcards and wearables. But as we look to the future, it’s worth taking a closer look at how the changing size and performance of biometrics came to transform the smartphone market, and what that means for these new form factors. Biometrics’ march into mobile Since entering the mobile market, we’ve continually been refining our biometric technology to meet ever-evolving customer and device maker requirements...
Can e-commerce be Africa’s economic goldmine?
Main, Tech

Can e-commerce be Africa’s economic goldmine?

Digital economy in Africa is snowballing, and in the process it’s creating new jobs and opportunities for digital entrepreneurs to explore a larger web market. Though e-commerce represents only 0.6% of all the transactions done in Africa, as compared to 12% in the USA and 20% in China; the budding nature of the industry does rightfully make one muse on the possibility, that e-commerce is indeed Africa’s economic goldmine. Facilitation of Cross Border eTrade The global market has shrunk to a large scale, and is now enabling billions of people to sell and purchase products across borders. This has been made possible by technological innovations that have birthed online marketplaces that enable e-trade between businesses (B2B), between consumers (C2C) and between businesses and consumers (B2C...
How new sensor technology opens up for smarter presence detection
Tech

How new sensor technology opens up for smarter presence detection

By Anders Jansson CTO, JonDeTech New sensor technology can bring about new and more efficient presence detection in, for example, the construction and real estate sector. The solution is a small, inexpensive, battery-powered and IoT-caged sensor that will also be able to be connected very quickly with the help of the upcoming 5G networks. Anders Jansson, CTO at the Swedish IR sensor company JonDeTech, explains how. A rapid technological development within what is known as the Internet of Things (IoT) means that more and more things in our everyday life will be connected. The connection is made with the help of a gateway or a hub, which can collect data from a large number of sensors, which it then sends to the cloud via, for example, 5G. IoT and sensors will be each other's preconditions i...
Business, Egypt News, Ghana News, Main, Nigeria News, Rwanda News, Tech, Uganda News

Friday@Noon on Financial Services in Africa: 2018

by Johan Burger The NTU-SBF Centre for African Studies publishes a weekly newsletter on issues relevant to Africa. This paper is based on issues addressed in the newsletter. The financial services industry in Africa has seen a lot of development throughout the past few years, as was the case in 2018. Mobile telephony has driven the US$300 million monthly transactions in Africa from 7.2 million new people (up 250% from 2012) using digital financial services and 45,000 new banking agents due to a financial inclusion project. Financial inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa has increased from 23% in 2011 to 43% in 2017. Mobile money solutions and agent banking now offer affordable, instant, and reliable transactions, savings, credit, and even insurance opportunities in rural villages and urban neigh...
Friday@Noon on E-commerce in Africa: 2018
Business, Egypt News, Kenya News, Nigeria News, Tech

Friday@Noon on E-commerce in Africa: 2018

by Johan Burger The NTU-SBF Centre for African Studies publishes a weekly newsletter on issues relevant to Africa. This paper is based on issues addressed in the newsletter. The growth and continuation of e-commerce in Africa has received various boosts during 2018. Africa’s leading online shopping platform, Jumia, reported in 2018 it wanted to make Egypt its biggest market on the continent, and it’s turning to Egypt’s vast network of unlicensed vendors for help. Jumia wants a 10-fold growth in revenue from Egypt and a 6-fold growth in the number of products offered on its platform by 2021. To achieve that, Jumia is urging the government to regulate informal retailers by offering them tax incentives and cheap loans that would allow them to market their goods online. The informal economy ac...
Online Marketplaces Could Create 3 Million Jobs in Africa by 2025
Business, Tech

Online Marketplaces Could Create 3 Million Jobs in Africa by 2025

Online marketplaces such as Jumia, Souq, Uber, and Travelstart could create around 3 million new jobs by 2025 across Africa. These digital platforms, which match buyers and providers of goods and services, could also raise incomes and boost inclusive economic growth with minimal disruption to existing businesses and workforce norms. These are among the findings of a new report, titled How Online Marketplaces Can Power Employment in Africa, released by Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Generating employment is an urgent priority across the continent. The African Development Bank estimates that one-third of the 420 million Africans age 15 through 35 were unemployed as of 2015. Around 58% of the new jobs—created directly, indirectly, and through the additional economic activity generated by onli...
Quantum, AI turns computing into a ‘loaded gun’
Tech

Quantum, AI turns computing into a ‘loaded gun’

Biggest-ever DevConf opens with warning on ethics in new world of computing Quantum computing and AI and machine learning are dramatically changing the face of computing, presenting the risk of a range of unintended consequences. This is according to Cliff de Wit, former chief innovation officer at Microsoft and now the CTO and co-founder of Metrofile group’s Dexterity Digital, who was addressing the opening of the annual DevConf developers’ conference in Johannesburg this week. De Wit said developers had moved from using low level building blocks to composition tools and high end platforms, quantum computing was fundamentally changing computing, and AI and machine learning were reversing traditional programming models. “Machine learning starts with a model, you feed in a sample output and...
The future of cards, contactless and biometrics in payments
Tech

The future of cards, contactless and biometrics in payments

By Thomas Rex, SVP at Fingerprints It's an interesting time for the humble payment card. Card payments have steadily risen in the last two decades, but innovation of the card has slowed since the launch of contactless over ten years ago. Until, that is, the recent entrance of the biometric payment card. But what’s the value in updating the card further? Contactless cards have gained real traction in the last decade, especially in Europe. But with many markets across the globe still to take the leap to contactless, and others already looking beyond the card to mobile payments, how can we expect the card to continue to be a success? Limitless convenience Two major things concern consumers about contactless cards: security and convenience. For those already happy ‘tapping’ with contactless pa...
Using advanced AI to stay ahead of cybercriminals
Tech

Using advanced AI to stay ahead of cybercriminals

By Doros Hadjizenonos, Regional Director – SADC at Fortinet Staying ahead of today’s accelerated cybercrime trends requires adding artificial intelligence (AI) to an organisation’s network security strategy As the threat landscape continues to evolve rapidly, it now includes increasingly sophisticated, zero-day malware that traditional security approaches can no longer keep pace with. As a result, security researchers estimate that the cost of cybercrime will outpace security spend by over 16X, reaching $2.1 trillion by the end of 2019. Staying ahead of today’s accelerated cybercrime trends requires adding artificial intelligence (AI) to an organisation’s network security strategy. The rise of artificial intelligence The goal of AI is to replicate the analytical processes of human intellig...