Nextrade partners with Visa Economic Empowerment Institute to highlight the power of global networks

Mankind has for millennia built networks for commerce and communication. The 21st century is an era of virtual global networks. Enabled by the Internet and mass-digitization, today’s networks – social media networks, messaging app networks, ecommerce marketplaces, cross-border electronic payments networks, and peer-to-peer lending services. Today’s global networks are multilateral, dense and intricate, with hundreds of millions of nodes and billions of interactions and transactions among them, and billions of possible new connections. Today’s networks are also highly accessible. Moreover, developing country consumers and companies that are today joining existing global networks with hundreds of millions of users stand to gain particularly significantly.

In 2020, Nextrade worked with Visa to highlight the value of global networks for developing countries, and the policies and practices that best enable developing country firms' and consumers to access global networks.

Nextrade and Visa's new Economic Empowerment Institute also worked on assessing, through surveys with over 3,000 developing country firms, how Covid has impacted firms' use of global networks, such as marketplaces and payment platforms. The results will be released in 2021.