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The rise of online banking around the world has helped other economies solve these very challenges. Cash, for example, is hard to transport. Coins and bills are prone to theft, and their use makes dodging taxes easier for those so inclined. For individuals who must pay in person, getting across a gridlocked city like Cairo is logistically difficult. Together, these problems can constrain an economy. In Egypt, where 94 percent of all transactions were cash as recently as 2014, such a system stymies economic growth.

Fawry is part of a new wave of technology companies ushering Egypt into the digital age. Many of these firms are helping transform industries like banking, health care, and transport, and in the process creating good jobs for young Egyptians, more than 30 percent of whom are unemployed.

This funding was secured from UK charity Shell Foundation, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), AV Ventures and Rabo Foundation. “This is a significant milestone for AgroCenta, having the support of leading institutions, particularly with the COVID-19 backdrop, underlining the strength of AgroCenta and the importance of its mission. The demand for agricultural raw materials from offtakers in the brewery, manufacturing and consumer sector is increasing exponentially because of the easing of the COVID-19 restrictions that were put in place by the government of Ghana, hence this capital injection will help to secure purchases at fair and transparent prices from smallholders — a much needed lifeline for many who are at the proverbial bottom of the pyramid”. Francis Obirikorang, AgroCenta’s CEO and Co-Founder Michael Ocansey said while highlighting the importance and criticality of this investment.

For a successful model, the Arab World can look to Kenya’s development of mobile money or “M-Pesa”. In many ways, the elements that lead to M-Pesa’s success in Kenya are already present in the Arab World. Young people in MENA are digitally savvy, are active on social media and are some of the heaviest users of mobile phones in the world.

The successful adoption of M-Pesa in Kenya reverberated across the African startup scene. It acted as a catalyzer and a signal for young entrepreneurs in Kenya and Africa as a whole: revolutionary ideas could be successfully implemented in Africa and generate both business opportunities and a development path for local communities.

Customers, when purchasing, simply need to scan a QR (quick response) code in store using their phones. And the customer can use any MasterCard or Visa card to sign up. Ehlers added: “We tried to design a product which allowed absolutely everybody to be part of the formal side of the economy.”

In an interview with How we made it in Africa, Ehlers explained: “A sizable part of why we built the product the way we did really relates to how the economy of South Africa functions. So to give one example, we built SnapScan so the merchant selling the products doesn’t need any special hardware at all. No point of sales system is required.” Merchants who don’t have bank accounts can redeem payments at any Standard Bank ATM or selected supermarkets.

SnapScan’s partnership with Standard Bank has allowed the company to grow faster. But Ehlers and his team are still required to adapt to the differences between the corporate and start-up worlds. He explained: “A start-up can quickly make a decision and then two hours later start implementing, whereas in a large corporation there is a process, things move a lot slower. Politics are involved and different people – and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, just the reality.”

ezoMoney provides a digital solution to informal savings schemes, allowing savings groups and individuals via their digital savings platform. BezoMoney has a wallet for each of the individuals who save with them. The digital savings platform provides access to loans and helps those saving with them create a comprehensive savings history to ensure transparency.  Bezo Money also provides investments, investment payment options, insurance, group purchase, and pensions services.

Undoubtedly, Ghana’s drive towards a cashless economy cannot be achieved without Financial Technology — FinTech. We’ve been pushed to an era where most people use mobile money services in the country, and have seen the birth of FinTech companies who render financial services and also provide foreign remittance services from countries across the world.

The Payment Systems and Services Act would help create an enabling environment for the on-going digitisation processes in the economy, Dr Ernest Addison, the Governor of the Bank of Ghana has said.

The Act, passed in March this year and assented to in May, is part of a broader strategy by the Bank of Ghana to create an enabling regulatory environment for convenient, efficient and safe retail payments and funds transfer mechanisms.

This is why the Vodacom-Safaricom duo has created a joint venture with full powers to make M-Pesa a “super-app” to provide for various needs such as booking taxis, making various appointments or paying for various services by mobile phone.

Safaricom launched new services as early as 2013, with M-Shwari, Fuliza and KCB M-Pesa came later to provide savings and micro-loans. By 2019, these “apps within apps” will account for two-thirds of M-Pesa’s revenues (84.4 billion shillings in total). “Remittances are still performing well and are up 14.6 per cent over the previous year,” said Sateesh Kamath, Safaricom’s chief financial officer.

M-PESA was cheaper than banks, and safer and more convenient than handling cash. The financial inclusion driven by M-PESA has greatly led to the growth of Kenya’s digital economy.

M-PESA”: that is a name in global fintech history that can never be erased. Not that anybody would want to. Forever it will be the perfect example of a viable financial ecosystem based on rules unthinkable before

SimbaPay is a UK-based digital money transfer service serving Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana that delivers money via existing mobile money wallet services and using its SimbaPay app. Simbapay and Kenya’s Family Bank recently launched an instant payment service from East Africa to China. Users can send funds to China through Family Bank’s PesaPap app or Safaricom’s M-Pesa.

Founded in 2009, Paga offers digital bank services (peer-to-peer money transfer, bill payments, online payments, and payroll), achieving a wide reach in Nigeria.

Financial intermediation and financial inclusion in sub-Saharan Africa remain low, despite progress in recent years. Helped by reforms, the depth and coverage of financial systems in sub-Saharan Africa—as measured by the standard indicators of financial development, such as the ratios of private sector credit to GDP and broad money to GDP—have significantly improved over the period 1995 to 2013 (Kasekende 2010). However, on average, countries in sub-Saharan Africa continue to have a shallower financial system than those in other developing regions of the world (Figure 1). In terms of financial inclusion, only 20 percent of the population has a bank account compared to 92 percent in advanced economies and 38 percent in nonadvanced economies (Table 1). Underinvestment, poor infrastructure, and comparatively low levels of financial literacy have contributed to the region being underbanked.

Mobile money transfer platform Mpesa has been voted Kenya’s leading superbrand.In a survey carried out by top urban consumers and undertaken by Kantar TNS in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu, leading telecommunications firm Safaricom, which owns the MPESA brand, came in second.It is the fourth year on the trot that MPESA has won this accolade, coming at a time the Covid-19 pandemic has hit the country’s economy.

Hailed as the “Kenyan technology success story”, many have claimed M-PESA to be a testimony to the greatness of the East African country’s technology scene, producing world-class technology companies that rival those in South Africa. However, is the acclaimed mobile money service really Kenyan at all? The answer is no. M-PESA is British.

By any stretch of the currently available facts, the service that accounts for more than 60 percent of Kenya’s GDP in transactions was conceived by British professionals. The company commissioned with developing the idea, Sagentia, into a workable technology was British. Additionally, the company that owns the intellectual property rights to the idea, Vodafone, is British and, lastly, it was funded in its initial stages by the British Government.

Despite this certificate being awarded in 2012 and being stated as being in the LITERARY category, Ouko insists he is the original M-PESA innovator and further elaborates by saying that he has been “trying to Patent a Money Transfer system way back in 2003”. Even though he says that he believes many more Kenyans contributed to the innovation and development of M-PESA without recognition or reward, he writes, “Even though I currently believe I am the one, I start this with an open mind. If another person or firm comes forward with compelling proof I am ready to step aside and support that person.”

Forging another link between Africa and China’s digital economies, the African-focused money transfer startup SimbaPay and Kenya’s Family Bank have launched an instant payment service from East Africa to China.

FinTechs and the Value Chains in the Financial IndustryIt is beneficial to remember how things worked before and after FinTechs and TechFins or big techs in the financial industry.Banking models are shifting significantly from a pipeline, vertical, paradigm, to modular solutions that pave the way to new banking paradigms that entail higher levels of openness toward third parties and a growing number of modular services bundled together.Value is created in platforms through economies of scope in production and innovation (Gawer, 2014). In order for platforms to work, adoption and network effects are essential. Models can go to mere compliance with the prescriptions of openness of PSD2, to the inclusion of new services, the opening of the banking core and data, and the aggregation of those within a platform experience. In particular, we assist both to the evolution of a Bank-as-a-Platform model and a tech-platform-driven model supporting banking and financial intermediation, which both constitute a new interesting field of analysis.Since the wave of digital transformation started entering the financial industr

, banking-as-a-business has started moving from a product/service perspective to more contextual solutions where providers are customer needs-driven. This is because customer-driven companies outperform the shareholder-driven ones, and this requires an outside-in approach.Having said that, it is beneficial to remember that digital transformation implies four main categories of innovation (product, process, organizational and business model) (Omarini, 2019, p. 340); all of them require rediscovering that a new strategy paradigm exists. This regards the concept of co-creation, and because of this no single firm can unilaterally carry out a process of continuous experimentation, risk reduction, time compression, and minimizing investment while maximizing market impact. Co-creation requires access to resources from extended networks (suppliers, partners, and consumer communities).Under these new market conditions, FinTechs have become an important piece of a bigger puzzle, each one in its own area of business (payment, lending, etc.), while at the beg

inning most of them started as mono-business companies. Only a few of them may become leaders in the market. On the one hand, there are those that make their strategy become international, and on the other, there are FinTechs which enlarge their services-scopes. However, the majority of them will become part of ecosystems where the direction could swing from banks to tech companies or to FinTechs as well, able to manage the network by developing kinds of conglomerate-as-a-service.Another interesting point to outline regards this recent period where all of us have experienced lockdowns around the world, and some effects have also impacted FinTechs as well. The valuations of most unicorns have crashed overnight, while on the FinTechs side there are different situations. Some of them have experienced a dramatic reduction in their

C’est un retour en force aux allures de pari. Quatre ans après avoir retiré M-Pesa du marché sud-africain, l’opérateur de télécommunications Vodacom a annoncé en juillet le lancement d’un nouveau service de paiement par mobile. L’offre sera conçue en partenariat avec Ant Financial Services Group, un groupe chinois qui commercialise le puissant service de mobile money Alipay, créé par le fondateur du site d’e-commerce Alibaba, Jack Ma.

Cette fois-ci, la filiale africaine de Vodafone tente à nouveau l’aventure sans s’appuyer sur M-Pesa, dont elle est pourtant devenue cette année le coactionnaire aux côtés de Safaricom, afin de justement favoriser son développement.

M-Pesa : quel miracle pour réussir hors du Kenya ?

Lending through a pandemic COVID-19 has prevented them settling into Kenya, where there are no less than 50 digital lending platforms competing for an adult population that is over 80% financially included.  Reports of predatory lending have increased red tape in the East African country. A newly gazetted directive bars digital lenders from reporting defaulting borrowers below certain amounts to credit bureaus, among other rules.  It increases the time it will take for a new entrant like Carbon to comfortably express its various services. “We haven’t really had a chance to test the engine,” Dozie says, but they have given out enough loans to calibrate their algorithm. In Nigeria, they have reduced lending to shore up against the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, revising the repayment schedule for 9,016 loans. However, Dozie says they are currently at more than half the level achieved last year, in value and volume. Another profitable year ahead? Carbon’s products need overall improvement, in responding to customer complaints (see responses to this tweet) about deductions, and notification lags, among others. The pandemic’s impact on the Nigerian economy could have an effect on the company’s bottom line. Profit in the next report might as well be less impressive than what this year’s report contains. “It will be easier to beat [this year’s] numbers in naira terms, but we are all at the mercy of macroeconomics on the dollar terms,” Dozie says. He says they will report whatever happens, as part of a long-term pitch to customers who, he believes, will be impressed by an honest expression of financial strength. Otherwise, focus remains on leveraging other strategic moves from 2019, notably the acquisition of payments startup Amplify.  The latter’s intellectual property has gone into developing an SME platform, as well as in developing Carbon Express, a smartphone keypad button that can be used for instant transactions within any app. Carbon acquired Amplify particularly for this feature and their engineering. Maxwell Obi, one of Amplify’s two co-founders who joined Carbon as part of the deal, has left the company, but the others have been instrumental in building valuable aspects like an iOS app.

Another value-adding space is credit reporting. Carbon doesn’t produce the reports; they source from partner bureaus, and make them available to customers. 

In an audited report published this week, Carbon, the Nigerian fintech company, declared that it made the naira equivalent of $312,905 in profit after tax in 2019. 

The digital transformation and e-payments company Fawry became the first listed tech company in Egypt with a market capitalisation of $1 billion last week. At the end of trading on 17 August, the market value of the company had jumped to LE15.56 billion (around $1 billion), meaning it is now rubbing shoulders with the likes of CIB (Egypt), QNB Al-Ahli, the Eastern Company, the Abu Qir Fertilisers Company, Telecom Egypt, and Al-Sewedy Electric in the EGX index billionaires’ club.

The Kenyan government's announcement of a new 10 percent tax in March 2013 threatened the future prospects of M-Pesa, Safaricom's mobile money transfer service, which had revolutionized the way money moved in Kenya. The new tax would be levied on all cash transfers but was largely targeted at M-Pesa, which controlled around 80 percent of the cash transfer market.

The Kenyan government's announcement of a new 10 percent tax in March 2013 threatened the future prospects of M-Pesa, Safaricom's mobile money transfer service, which had revolutionized the way money moved in Kenya

The Kenyan government's announcement of a new 10 percent tax in March 2013 threatened the future prospects of M-Pesa, Safaricom's mobile money transfer service, which had revolutionized the way money moved in Kenya.

In 2019, Fawry became the first fintech company to IPO in the region and since taking that step, the price of its stock has risen by 300 per cent. In August, Fawry became Egypt’s first tech ‘unicorn,’ born during a global pandemic and what is quickly becoming a global economic meltdown of massive proportions.

Visa and Fawry sign strategic partnership to accelerate digital payments acceptance

One of the key solutions that the partnership aims to address is the need to enable a digital ecosystem that easily supports the needs of consumers and merchants. Through Visa Direct’s peer to peer transfer and low cost QR solutions, millions of customers – regardless of who they bank with – would be able to make peer to peer and business to business transactions easily and securely so they can move money in real time.