A Big Think Interview With Michael Landau | Big Think

A Big Think Interview With Michael Landau

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A conversation with the chairman of MAP International.

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Michael Landau:

Mr. Landau is the Chairman of MAP International. He is an entrepreneur who has built a portfolio of ventures in real estate, mortgage banking, information and communication technologies, and advanced banking solutions. He also serves as Chairman of MAP International’s sister company, MAPcash.

Mr. Landau is a former board member of Regalian PLC, a British real estate development company.

Mr. Landau has been an invited speaker at several conferences and forums, among them a presentation on “Africa’s Industrial Drive: The Private Sector and Corporate Citizenship” at the African Union/U.N. Global Compact Private Sector Forum in Addis Ababa. At this event MAP International was featured as “best practice.” Mr. Landau was also an invited speaker at the CHOGM, the Commonwealth Business Forum in November 2007 in Uganda, and was recently an invited speaker at the AOSIS/United Nations Foundation and Friends on Climate Change Roundtable, hosted by the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations.

Active in community-based initiatives, Mr. Landau has hosted and chaired several political forums and meetings with the New York City Police Department. He is the chairman of the Council of Orthodox Jewish Organizations of Manhattan (New York City), an umbrella group representing the Jewish community to government and political leaders. He also has extensive experience interfacing with UN leaders as a community representative—a relationship that began when he initiated the creation of a UN special stamp edition in remembrance of the International Day of Commemoration for Victims of the Holocaust.

Mr. Landau was recently invited to serve on the board of the World Sports Alliance, an intergovernmental organization whose mission is to use sport as a catalyst to design and implement programs to realize the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. He received his bachelor's degree from the London School of Economics and a master's degree in real estate development and finance from New York University. He received his law degree from Yeshiva University's Cardoza School of Law and is admitted to practice law in New York, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia. He and his wife reside in New York City with their four children.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question:What is MAP International doing in Africa?

Michael Landau: MAP International is currently building an electronic financial infrastructure program in partnership with the government of Uganda, whereby we are enabling the citizens who are previously unbankable because of their lack of identification. And we are incorporating the unbanked population by using our biometric systems and then integrating that information into a banking platform and producing ID cards and bank cards and enabling the previously unbanked to become part of a formal sector. And along with our relationship with the government, we are now building out a full banking infrastructure in the country, which includes mobile banking, Point-of-Sale machines, computer, online computer banking, and ATM machines, and creating a rather holistic integrated solution for the financial sector in Uganda.

Uganda is a country with 32 million people and counting, according to the statistics, which are very difficult to come by, good statistics in many of these developing countries. There’re some two million bank accounts in Uganda of which they don’t know how many unique users have those bank accounts. So assuming that there’re a 50 percent of unique users or even if you keep the two million less than 10 percent of people in Uganda, according to statistics that we have, have actual, have actual bank accounts and of those bank accounts, very few people have any form of electronic banking. So the majority, the vast majority of the 90 percent of the people don’t have bank accounts. The primary reason why they don’t have bank accounts is because the people don’t have a KYC identification, means Know Your Customer. They don’t have what President Museveni refers to as bankable identity.

Question:What is MAP’s role in Uganda?

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