Last August Google announced a crackdown on short term lending apps offered on its Android platform; but it appears to be implementing this ban in an uneven way; some apps get banned and then reinstated, other apps have adapted to Google’s new rules and have remained in the Google Play app store; in Kenya, five of the top ten most popular free apps are for short term loans; to get around the ban lenders offered loans of at least two months duration but despite this many users have opted for the shorter term loans; some apps have remained on the app store while only offering loans of 30 days or less; Matt Flannery, CEO of Branch said that Google should not be regulating finance, “Instead of iterating on a single global rule for the world’s lenders,” he wrote, Google “should just defer to the actual central banks.” Bloomberg
