Jake Kendall

Partner, DFS Lab

Jake is co-founder and partner at DFS Lab and early stage investor supporting companies who are creating the digital commerce infrastructure in Africa. He has been investing in African digital platforms since the launch of M-Pesa a decade ago both at the World Bank and then the Gates Foundation. At Gates, his team invested over $1B in mobile money and digital payments projects around the world including leading players like bKash in Bangladesh, and M-Pesa and Equity Bank in Africa. Jake has a BS in Physics from MIT and a PhD in Economics and his academic research work has focused on low income populations and their usage of digital services.

By Jake Kendall

Blog

The Poor Need Better Payment Services

Poor people’s need for domestic payments is often large, whether it is spurred by migrant labor remittances, informal support networks of friends and family, government welfare payments, or utility payments.
Research

Measuring Financial Access around the World

This paper introduces a new set of financial access indicators for 139 countries across the globe and describes the results of a preliminary analysis of this data set. The new data set builds on previous work using a similar methodology.