HeyJaredThe Barefoot Economist
Weekly breakdown of essential stories on financial inclusion technology, bringing a fresh perspective on emerging market business model innovation, misconceptions about the unbanked segments and one-size-fits-all strategy mistakes that kill businesses.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 13
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- Oct 1, 2026
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- Jul 11, 2026
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🌯 September 2026 in one idea (opens the original)
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Before you dive into this month’s wrap, let's improve it together: 60 seconds to shape what I write next and who I build for. Who’s reading & what are you building?Liquidity is the symptom on the dashboard: the one number everyone watches. The constraint sits underneath it: in who actually owns the rails, in whether the network can even see itself, and in the capillarity that no interoperabil
📮 Why capillarity beats interoperability and postal networks matter more than ever (opens the original)
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A year ago, almost a week, Dominique Collin from La Banque Postale invited me to contribute a chapter to Exploring New Frontiers, a book on where postal networks could go next. On Wednesday, it launched at Parcel+Post Expo in London, and I held the first thing I have ever had printed in ink.The chapter was written for postal operators. Reading it again this week, I see a piece about agent network segmentation. Post offices are natural distributors inside the financial inclusion toolkit. Same cas
🐕🦺 The Network That Can’t See Itself (opens the original)
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The advantage that keeps winning in African finance is observation. Anyone can move a customer’s money. Seeing enough of their economic life to price the risk lets you lend to them, insure them, or build something on the relationship. That was the argument about MTN and its customers: distribution moves the money; observation decides who gets paid.There’s a harder question underneath it. For any of that underwriting to work, MTN has to see more than the customer. It has to see the machine that r
💰 MTN Doesn't Want to Become a Bank. It wants to stop renting one. (opens the original)
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Everyone’s watching MTN chase a banking licence and calling it “telco becomes bank”. I feel that may be the boring question here…. The interesting one is why the profit formula is flipping and what it reveals about lending in Africa, which the banks could never see.Headlines about MTN’s banking push make the same move. Telco wants to be a bank. As if the licence is the hard part.It isn’t. The licence is the cheapest thing MTN will acquire this decade. For a bank, the charter comes first, and the
🔦 Liquidity is not your problem. It’s the only problem you can see. (opens the original)
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Two sentences I have heard from almost every operator I’ve spoken to since I launched The Agent Network Free Diagnostic back in April this year.We need to expand the portfolio.Our agents don’t have liquidity.They arrive as two separate problems, usually in that order, and usually with the second offered as the reason the first hasn’t happened yet.They are not two problems. They are one sentence said from both ends, and neither end is the middle.<
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