A provocative and heartening look at a revolution in financial services.
A detailed account of how new technologies are helping people excluded from traditional financial services, resulting in large-scale industry disruption.
About 2.5 billion people—half the world’s adult population—are effectively excluded from financial institutions and instruments largely taken for granted by the other half. For the poorest population, this means that even the simplest tasks—cashing a paycheck, sending a remittance to a family member, applying for a small loan, etc.—are either impossible or prohibitively expensive. Oftentimes, merely opening a bank account is daunting due to the onerous deposit requirements or demands for multiple identification documents. The modern banking world is built like a pyramid: cheap and effective for those who comfortably reside at the top and predatory for those stuck at the bottom. Debut authors Mehta and Realini, both veteran entrepreneurs with backgrounds in financial-services innovation, depict the plight of these “financial nomads” addled with practical burdens, not to mention their regular indignities. The good news is that sophisticated alternatives—especially ones built on easily accessible mobile platforms—now offer much needed relief. The authors discuss several specific programs that have already become widely adopted in places like Kenya, the Philippines, and Bangladesh. Not only are these systems achieving great success, they are also compelling a sea change within the all-too-exclusionary banking sector. The book includes a discussion of practical ways to improve financial inclusiveness, like revising an antiquated system for formulating credit scores worldwide. The more sweeping argument the authors make is that these looming changes will not only benefit the poorest, but will generally stimulate economic growth and encourage increased governmental transparency. This is an impressively lucid work that necessarily engages highly technical issues in accessible prose. Underlying every analytical insight is refreshing optimism regarding the future of international financial services. While readers might not agree with the sentiment expressed in the foreword, written by Jeffrey D. Sachs, that the “end of poverty is coming our way,” it’s hard to disagree that welcome changes are here, with more on the horizon.
A provocative and heartening look at a revolution in financial services.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4602-6551-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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