Philippine pesos
IN PHOTO: A worker counts peso bills inside a money exchange booth located in Manila's financial district of Makati February 6, 2009. The Philippine's gross international reserves climbed to a record $39.6 billion at the end of January, due largely to inflows from the government's sovereign bond issue and power privatisation programme, the central bank said on Friday. REUTERS/John Javellana

Financial literacy website Born2Invest has launched a mobile app in the Philippines in an aim to make finance journalism available to emerging markets.

“Business and financial literacy is key. What we found is that there is a huge demand and hunger for the type of content we intend to deliver via text, sound, and video form through our mobile application. Yet that same content is hard to come by in emerging markets, on mobile devices specifically,” explained Dom Einhorn, the founder and CEO of Born2Invest.

The Born2Invest mobile app aims to integrate all of the company’s articles with business and finance news from trusted sources and make them available in 50 or more languages. The international version of the app was launched in the Philippines last July 22.

As Einhorn noted, economic and finance updates only take a small part of the media coverage in the country. The majority of news on social media alone is about entertainment and viral stories. The company’s app offers crucial news on users’ fingertips in their local language 24/7. It will also put a special emphasis on financial literacy in those markets through the inclusion of educational content and more.

“Our intent is to offer an app that ‘fills the information gap,’ the void and disconnect that is left in the market place by major news and media sources who either don’t understand the emerging market or don’t care to cater to it,” he said.

Einhorn added that the Born2Invest app will offer a “one-size-fits-all” approach, with a technology and a content management system aiming to deliver a fully customised news feed to each user, no matter where in the world he or she is located. In the Philippines, more people will have access to smartphones by the end of 2015 due to a decrease of price in units.

According to a research , mobile penetration in the Philippines will hit 50 percent in 2015. This development will pave way for an even greater opportunity for Filipinos to learn about finances as the country’s economy continues to surge.

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