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strategy development process, especially when the various units and individuals in the network must collectively execute that strategy. The key issue is this: balancing act between collaborating and competing is delicate and crucial” (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004, p. 197).If co-creation is fundamental to the industry, this needs to leverage on a wider customer perspective that requires introducing the idea of developing ecosystems where the customer is truly free to move and choose the best deal in more competitive markets able to let consumers' ability to make informed decisions against any possible market concentrations among market providers.A business ecosystem (Moore, 1996) reflects the new paradigm of competition in a better way. Traditional management models aimed at gaining competitive advantage, such as vertical or horizontal integration, economies of scale and scope, are not effective anymore. The value of today's companies is determined by the size of its ecosystem (Tewari, 2014). Business ecosystems consist in crossovers of a variety of industries, of which companies cooperate and embrace open innovation to satisfy new customers' needs an

sons can be learnt from difficult times especially due to external factors such as the following:- People costs and per-customer contribution margin are key factors, and valuable indicators. They are valuable for incumbents too. When staff costs rise, then this becomes a burden if growth is not going to move on. Then, if we move on the per-customer contribution margin (revenue, minus variable costs including credit losses), then this makes a FinTech earn more money per bank account than the cost of running those bank accounts.- One more point has to do with the way a FinTech makes its revenues per customer, and net income is the figure to look out for here. This means that the more sources of revenues a company holds, the better it is for it. If we think of some of the best-known FinTechs, they gather their net income from interchange fees, ATM withdrawals, which can diminish during the pandemic, but gathering revenues from other sources such as lending, investing, or again from referring customers to third-party services, and earning commissions from these referrals.Under this oncoming market structure configuration, a focus on control and ownership of resources is giving way to the importance of accessing and leveraging resources through unique ways of collaboration. “The co-creation process also challenges the assumption that only the firm's aspirations matter. (…) Every participant in the experience network collaborates in value creation and competes in value extraction. This result in constant tension in the

evaluation, others were quite lucky and suffered less.There are many and different feelings on the way FinTechs will exit this situation, which as far as we understand has overall accelerated some strategic choices.First of all, there are many and different FinTechs in the market. What is critical is to look at the fundamentals of the business. All of them are about answering what society is going to look like in the future (attitudes, behaviors, habits, etc.), so that if we no longer need to go to retail stores anymore, why do we need some services based on this situation? This, again, underlines that banking is a people business (Omarini, 2015) and this requires a business to be resilient to become adaptive to consumer changes or moves into a different market where you can still apply the service because the society is not yet ready to shift somewhere else, which means the same business in different markets. Just think of the ongoing situation where the recent wave of people is rethinking and restructuring their finances, so that they have decided to switch rates to digital banks. In this scenario, the winners are those that have enough liquidity—or better still cash-rich—to buy good technology and invest in new directions, also taking the opportunity to use the pandemic to its advantage. This is especially true for payments that are going to be increasingly contactless. However, some more les

One more point has to do with the way a FinTech makes its revenues per customer, and net income is the figure to look out for here. This means that the more sources of revenues a company holds, the better it is for it. If we think of some of the best-known FinTechs, they gather their net income from interchange fees, ATM withdrawals, which can diminish during the pandemic, but gathering revenues from other sources such as lending, investing, or again from referring customers to third-party services, and earning commissions from these referrals.

The emergence of new technologies and players, along with a favorable regulatory framework (PSD2 Directive), is changing the banking industry. FinTechs and TechFins have allowed the introduction of new services and changed the way customers interact to satisfy their financial needs. The FinTech landscape is constantly evolving in the market. Different business value propositions are entering the financial services industry, moving from increasing the user's experience to developing a time to market framework for banks to innovate products, processes, and channels, increasing the cost efficiency and looking for a “partnering on order” to lighten the regulatory burdens for banks. The many businesses of banks are changing their value chains, and banks' business models should do the same accordingly. Strategists could no longer take their value chains as a given; choices have to be made on what needs to be protected and maintained, what abandoned and the new on coming to make banks evolve and become more resilient in doing their job. Banking is shifting significantly from a pipeline, vertical paradigm, to open banking business models where open innovation, modularity, and ecosystem-based bank's business model may become the ongoing mainstream and paradigm to follow and develop. Opportunities and threats for banks are many and new ones to re-gaining their role in the market throughout a re-intermediation process.

They have brought to the traditional banking industry a wave of competition and broken pipeline value chains, unbundling them into different modules of products or services, which may be combined among themselves. These companies on the one hand and the BigTechs (Google, Facebook, Apple, Samsung, Alibaba, etc.) on the other have been forcing the industry to change, transform, and evolve in a set of new financial intermediation directions. Use of data and customer experience are both FinTechs' major assets and threats as well. On the one hand, they please the customers as individuals and introduce the paradigm of contextual banking. On the other, the two selling points are threatening both the incumbent players and regulators in different ways. For banks, it is even more urgent to react actively because their “no fee zone” is expanding, due to new regulations from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureaus (CFPB) and similar entities in different countries.

Customers who sign up for the M-Pesa service can convert between e-cash and real cash (these are called cash-in / cash-out transactions), and can transfer e-cash from their account to that of another account holder via SMS. Cash-in / cash-out operations take place at one of many designated M-Pesa retail outlets, also known as “agents”. These agents are not employed by Safaricom, but are simply retailers / regular businessmen and women that are ‘authorized’ to trade e-cash for real cash.

Although some of M-Pesa’s initial success could be attributed to a uniquely favorable context for mobile-payments (strong customer need, welcoming regulatory environment, support from banks, strong brand awareness of Safaricom), its rapid and sustained growth was only possible due to a thoughtful operating model design, particularly regarding M-Pesa’s “agent network.”

Revenue from transaction fees that Safaricom collects via the agent during cash withdrawal operations and transfer operations (depositing money into mobile wallet is free). Reduce Safaricom customers’ churn, improve engagement, lifetime value etc.

Prime Bank, a private bank in Kenya, has partnered with London-based fintech, SimbaPay, to launch an instant international money transfer service via the bank's digital platform, PrimeMobi, according to a press releaseThrough SimbaPay, Prime Bank customers will now be able to instantly and securely send money directly to bank accounts or mobile wallets across 15 countries including Africa, Europe, Asia, India, United Kingdom, China, Germany and Uganda.

Prime and SimbaPay partner to launch international money transfer service

Fawry is an Egyptian company that started in 2009 with the purpose of offering electronic payment services through several payment channels. The service started at banks and a big network of outlets all over the republic as well as Egypt post. Now we are covering about 60 types of bills, where we cover the telecommunications sector and lately we covered all electrical companies in the country and some water companies. We also offer our services at universities and syndicates. Adding to that, users can now buy their airline tickets through us.

f your downside potential from disruptive threats. Incumbents can choose to invest in companies they partner with or to focus on areas they know well or interesting adjacencies. We frequently advise clients to find ways of keeping corporate venture-capital groups slightly at arm’s length to attract skilled managers, and we recently have seen increased interest in investing in established outside managers who focus on financial technology. Transform yourself to be more like a fintech. Digital transformation is a difficult but necessary process for most incumbent financial institutions. Redesigning core infrastructure to be more modular and dynamic, driving a new agile operating model, and upgrading technology and workforce skills are all necessary to compete with outside threats, fintech and otherwise. Build your own (internal) fintech. The road for transformations is normally measured in years, but the competitive threat from fintechs is today. Increasingly, we are seeing financial institutions try to beat fintechs at their own game or self-disrupt areas of their business before others can. The key to success in new digital business building is to combine the agility, speed, and talent of a start-up with the “unfair advantage” of an incumbent by leveraging existing assets (e.g. customers, distribution, or infrastructure). Serve the fintechs. A few financial institutions can find their competitive advantage in creating scaled, efficient technology and operations to enable others to embed financial services in their customer experiences. This “banking as a service” business model depends on finding a profitable path to white labeling but draws on the inspiration of large tech platforms. Enabling the customer experiences of others has quickly moved beyond just enabling fintechs to also working with big technology companies, retailers, telecommunications companies, and beyond. Ignore fintechs. Although ignoring the competition is rarely the right choice, some businesses are built on moats—frequently regulatory—that are difficult to disrupt or they play within narrow markets. Companies should prioritize where they need to focus and in doing so know when they need to pay attention and when they need to avoid the distraction of disrupters.

Financial-technology companies are changing the face of finance. Over the past ten years, what started mostly as disruption in the payments space has expanded to every corner of finance. Even areas once assumed to be safe are seeing new entrants and competitive threats. Wealth and asset management, wholesale banking, capital markets, regulation and risk (“regtech”), and trade finance are just the most recent areas to see innovation driven by small technology-first players.

usinesses as well as Kenyans and expatriates with friends and family abroad send over $18 Billion to other African countries, Asia and Europe annually with several billi

Prime Bank (www.Primebank.co.ke), a leading private bank in Kenya, has partnered with London-based FinTech SimbaPay (www.SimbaPay.com), to launch an instant international money transfer service via the bank’s digital platform PrimeMobi.

Through the platform, customers can easily check the status of their policies, approvals, and lodge insurance claims from online platform.

Mukuru has been at the forefront of technology launching a multitude of cutting-edge initiatives designed to solve problems for the African migrant diaspora.This year has seen it launch Mukuru Groceries – a service that is giving SADC based customers the ability to send groceries to their families and communities back home in Zimbabwe.At a time when many families are struggling to obtain basic commodities, Mukuru Groceries will help support Zimbabwe’s large diaspora in their quest to send critical financial resources to families back home.

Through our partnerships we have over 300,000 pay-in and pay-out points across Africa. We’ve partnered with major banks in all the territories we operate in – if we don’t have a licence, particularly at the outset of a product or service offering, in the country, then we have to use an authorised dealer bank. We work with the big retailers in South Africa, that have been exceptional at making their branch infrastructure with their footprint available to digital services. So we work with all the big retailers in South Africa and similarly so in other territories, so companies like Shoprite, Pick n Pay,Boxer, Spar, PEP, Massmart, complemented by mobile wallets like mPesa – a range of key names.

The company has also formed a partnership with WorldRemit, a leading global online money transfer service, to facilitate money transfers to Zimbabwe from across the globe. The partnership will be instrumental in bringing world-class financial services to Zimbabweans and generating new synergies for African financial inclusion

SnapScan is today announcing its first major update since its QR code payments feature was popularised in 2013.

“The key difference is essentially the ability to provide even more convenience and speed to

improve the payment process,” CEO of SnapScan Kobus Ehlers explained in a phone interview. “They can now complete the payment anywhere within the range of the store’s beacon.”The new functionality is already available at 30 SnapScan merchants in Cape Town and 20 others around the country which have iBeacons. See the list here.“If you have the feature enabled, and you walk into the range of one of these beacons, it’ll simply display a Pay Here button,” he explained. iPhone users will even have a Merchants icon on their lock screen which means that you don’t even have to open the app to pay.

South African payments startup SnapScan is today announcing its first major update since its QR code payments feature was popularised in 2013. The new payment channel, called SnapBeacons, is meant to provide users a frictionless alternative solution to pay for stuff. Instead of just being able to pay by scanning a QR code, SnapScan customers can now simply tap a button in the app to initiate the transaction via Bluetooth. A message on the customer’s phone will alert them when the option is available.

Several major international companies like Virgin Atlantic, Apple, Macy’s and Walmart are already adopting beacon technology and proximity-based products are a growing trend. “We’re the first in South Africa to roll this technology out and we want to see how we can improve the user experience accordingly,” Ehlers boasted.An added feature, not a pivot

Ehlers noted that from the beginning, the Standard Bank-backed company wasn’t tied to just QR codes. It’s always been looking at new technologies to make mobile payment processes better. “To that end, we constantly play with a whole host of different technologies in the payments channel, of which the one that really got us excited was iBeacons.”An added bonus, the CEO notes that SnapBeacons will only be available to those who are keen to try it out. You can disable the feature if you want to.Read more: From stores to the streets: SnapScan’s road to a cashless society

“We’ve decided not to turn it on by default because we’re quite sensitive that people may want to consider whether they want this feature and reassure themselves that it’s not a big change that will happen over night.” It’s worth noting that this isn’t a complete transition. In some occasions SnapBeacons will make sense, while in other, it won’t.Furthermore, because it’s a hardware based product, it will only be compatible with a certain range of phones like the iPhone 4S and up or most smartphones running Android 4.3 and up.

A partnership with a UK-based company will give Prime Bank customers in Kenya access to mobile payments. Nairobi-headquartered private bank Prime Bank has taken a further step into the fintech market by launching an international money transfer service, in collaboration with London-headquartered company SimbaPay.

The world’s leading fintechs are using crowdfunding to cement and enhance their relationship with their customers. The latest Unicorns report from Beauhurst, an independent analysis firm, identifies the UK’s 21 unicorn companies – those worth $1bn (around £760m) or more. Of the 21, six are fintechs, and two are digital banks: Monzo and Revolut. Both have turned to crowdfunding – at a time when they are the darlings of the tech scene and its investors – to raise capital. 

To answer that, I believe we have to go back to the financial crisis. After 2008, a chasm opened up in financial markets, encouraged by a profound lack of trust. We’re well-versed with the outcomes. The banks that survived had to change their ways, and new players came onto the scene. A decade later, it is the novel relationship between these latest entrants and consumers that gives us an idea of what the future looks like: a world where any business-to-consumer company knows that sharing ownership with its customers is fundamental to long-term success. This is the cooperative movement of the twenty-first century, and it is driven by technology.

Existing Mukuru customers will not be required to register for the grocery service, they will simply follow the same process on USSD and WhatsApp to create an order and pay at any Mukuru pay-in partner using a payment reference (similar to the cash order reference).

We have listened carefully to what our customers are asking for, and we have innovated and added to our service offering to make sure that Zimbabwean families receive the resources and support that they so desperately need right now,” says Andy Jury, CEO, Mukuru.

“Time is of the essence, and Fawry saves me a lot of it,” says Shawky, who owns three electronics stores in the Egyptian capital.

It was something that Cairo-based shop owner Nader Shawky had come to dread: paying his phone bill. Every month, he trekked to the offices of his mobile provider where he and dozens of others stood in line—sometimes for up to two hours—to settle their bills. It was, he admits, a maddening process.

Fawry, a fast-growing Cairo-based company that specializes in electronic payments, makes it possible for Shawky to take care of his accounts online.

Fawry’s growth has had a profound effect on Egypt’s economy, says Akef el Maghrabi, the vice chairman of Banque Misr, one of Egypt’s biggest banks and an early Fawry partner. “When you eliminate or reduce the reliance on cash, then you fight corruption, you provide convenience, you lower costs, and you grow the economy. [Electronic payments] do a lot of good for the country.”

IFC invested $6 million in Fawry in 2013 and helped guide founder Ashraf Sabry and his team as they built their business. Now the 12-year-old company handles 2.5 million transactions a day. In 2018 Fawry processed 40 billion Egyptian pounds (about $2.5 billion) in electronic payments. Earlier in 2019, Fawry became Egypt’s largest financial technology firm to list on the national stock exchange. It now employs 1,600 people.

As the Fawry network grew, shop owners who installed the system saw significant benefits, too. Fawry’s terminals drew new customers into stores, providing the consumer traffic that is the lifeblood of small shops. Mahmoud El Rawy, a grocery store owner and father of three, can attest to that. His shop struggled until he installed a Fawry payment terminal. “Fawry has had a big impact on my business,” says El Rawy, who now owns three supermarkets. “It helped bring me more customers and it’s why many come to me now.”

Goldman Sachs cash confirms Jumo as fintech heavyweight

By entering Jumo's final $55 million round of financing, the US bank Goldman Sachs is raising the South African fintech's profile

Jumo is connected to continental telecom operators such as Tigo, Airtel, and MTN as well as traditional banks such as Letshego in Ghana and Barclays in Zambia, to integrate its offers with those of its partners.

Since 2018, the start-up has partnered with Uber in Nairobi to provide drivers with access to loans for the purchase of cars based on their rating and with flexible repayment options.By 2019, the start-up, claimed to have provided more than $bn in loans to 15 million customers, and to employ 300 people across 11 countries.

Since 2018, the start-up has partnered with Uber in Nairobi to provide drivers with access to loans for the purchase of cars based on their rating and with flexible repayment options.

Jumo is connected to continental telecom operators such as Tigo, Airtel, and MTN as well as traditional banks such as Letshego in Ghana and Barclays in Zambia, to integrate its offers with those of its partners. Since 2018, the start-up has partnered with Uber in Nairobi to provide drivers with access to loans for the purchase of cars based on their rating and with flexible repayment options.

With this new round of financing — its fourth since April 2018 — the company, which targets emerging markets and is part of the very select club of African start-ups active beyond the continent’s borders, now intends to conquer Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, as well as Bangladesh and India