I’m Investing in Haaland First to Score in the Champions League Final

Dateline: Woking, 20th May 2023.The U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Reuters that it is “critical” to put in place a strong regulatory framework for crypto, which I am sure we all agree with because good regulation means a great opportunity for new fintech products and services, but evidence suggests that (depending on what you mean by “crypto”) the crypto market is not a financial market as we currently understand it, so simply “cracking down” with existing financial services regulation is unlikely to be optimal. We need some new thinking and perhaps the public health perspective provide a valuable perspective.ShareGamblingThe Kenyan mobile payment service M-Pesa (by some measures Africa’s most successful fintech) transformed the national economy in incredible ways. There are now more than 200,000 SMEs using M-Pesa’s API, more than half a million businesses that transact more than £5 billion per month and M-Pesa has a network of partners that allows subscribers to send and receive money from more than 200 countries and territories. A non-bank payment system has changed people’s lives in ways that could not have been envisaged by the people who created it.Subscribe nowBut it has its downsides too. Kenyans spent heading towards 200 billion Kenyan Shillings on gambling through M-Pesa in the year to last March (up a quarter on the previous year), underlining the scale of the problem. This is not a Kenyan problem, as in many other countries, smartphones and new ways to pay online are accompanied by what Jonathan Rosen calls the…I’m Investing in Haaland First to Score in the Champions League Final