Cambridge Business School Leads Global FinTech Push
- The redoubtable Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge is spearheading a “pioneering move to accelerate technology enabled financial innovation and knowledge sharing in huge and previously underserved territories”, according to a report from Business Weekly. We run an excerpt from the piece below.
The new collaboration will inform FinTech market development and regulatory innovation through generation of data, insight, digital tools and a suite of capacity building and education programmes.
The initiative is being jointly steered by The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) based at Cambridge Judge Business School and the Ioannis Gregoriou School of Business Administration at the European University Cyprus. It covers the massive MENA-MED region – the Middle East and North Africa, including Gulf territories, and the Mediterranean.
The venture will see a dedicated team recruited to facilitate collaborative research under three highly integrated pillars to contribute to the creation and transfer of FinTech and digital financial services (DFS) related knowledge.
The partners say the move will help facilitate FinTech and DFS market development and effect regulatory changes across MENA-MED and beyond.
At the outset, the partners will undertake in-depth diagnostic analyses on the market and regulatory environment in the region. The results will be deployed via the second pillar – the development of digital tools that will inform both regulatory and market decision-making.
The third pillar will deliver evidence-based capacity-building and education programmes for regulators and policymakers. This will include activities ranging from online programmes to offline, in-situ training in the region.
This latest initiative marks a complementary collaboration agreement to those signed already this year with FSD Africa in sub-Saharan Africa and Abu Dhabi Global Market Academy in MENA.
Historical Performance And IFISA Process Guide
- Money&Co. lenders have achieved an average return of more than 8 per cent gross (before we deduct our one per cent fee).
That figure is the result of over £20 million of loans facilitated on the site, as we bring individuals looking for a good return on capital together with carefully vetted small companies seeking funds for growth. Bear in mind that lenders’ capital is at risk. Read warnings on site before committing capital.
- Money&Co. has been lending for over 5 years and has only had two bad debts so far, representing a bad debt rate of 0.03 per cent per annum.
All loans on site are eligible to be held in a Money&Co. Innovative Finance Individual Savings Account (IFISA), up to the annual ISA limit of £20,000. Such loans offer lenders tax-free income. Our offering is an Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA) that can hold the peer-to-peer (P2P) business loans that Money&Co. facilitates. For the purposes of this article, the terms ISA and IFISA are interchangeable.
So here’s our guide to the process:
- Step 1: Register as a lender. Go to the login page, and go through the process that the law requires us to effect. This means we have to do basic checks on you to comply with money-laundering and other security requirements.
- Step 2: Put money into your account. This is best done by electronic transfer. We can also process paper cheques drawn in favour of Denmark Square Limited, the parent company of Money&Co.
- Step 3: Buy loans in the loan market. Once you’ve put cash in your account it will sit there – and it won’t earn interest until you’ve bought a piece of a loan. It’s this final step that requires lenders and IFISA investors to be pro-active. Just choose some loans – all loans on the Money&Co. site can be held in an IFISA – and your money will start earning tax-free interest.
The ISA allowance for 2019/20 is unchanged from last tax year at £20,00