Shirky: US overlooks China's fundamental mobile payment innovations
Clay Shirky · a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China · Jan 2, 2019 · at 7:51
Clay Shirky, academic and author living in Shanghai, compares American consumer fintech tools like Mint with China's broader structural shift toward alternate digital currencies like Alipay.
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“The kinds of innovations around e-commerce where people are paying using their mobile phones as with M-Pace in Kenya or have entirely alternate payment systems as with Alipay here, that's a kind of innovation Americans don't even recognize, right? Our innovations around the financial system right now look like mint. Whereas in China, it really is an entire alternate electronic currency”
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