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Congrats to the #FintechSouth #Innovation Challenge Finalists!Artis Technologies, EnrichHER, EthioPay, Finosec, Griffin, Immediate, InvestGuard, Lendsmart, Ryze and VIVA Finance will compete on 10/5 for chance to present on the conference’s main stage & win $25k AND a year of free ATDC membership ;)

The 2019 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) was released worldwide on 23 January 2020, scoring and ranking 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of corruption.  The Index put together by Transparency International ranks countries annually by their perceived levels of corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys.

The index foresees a range between zero (highly corrupt) and 100 (very clean), and based on these points, it ranks countries from the best performing to the worst-performing.  Since CPI is a perception index, no country will ever achieve a perfect score.  

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.

Judging by the recent set of results from Purple Group, their easy-to-use and cost effective EasyEquities trading platform is well on its way to becoming one of the leading platforms of the investing world. This relationship enables Satrix, the largest equity index tracking provider in South Africa, to employ the same innovative technology driving the EasyEquities platform to offer ETF’s to the nation.

The Insurtech award which targets non-insurers collaborating with insurers to improve customer service delivery, product development and innovation was organised by the African Reinsurance Corporation (Africa Re). The company was recognised for successfully managing over 4.3 million smallholder farmers through their Area Yield Index Insurance product. It provides insurance services and digital solutions to farmers in 12 countries in Africa, with Nigeria being the leading market for Pula.

Sanlam’s recent deal to acquire a 30% stake in EasyEquities for R100m sparked a lot of interest in the market. However, Sanlam-owned Satrix and EasyEquities have struck up partnerships prior to this deal with the advent of SatrixNOW, an offering that taps a white-labeled EasyEquities service. CEO of Satrix, Helena Conradie, took some time out earlier this week to chat to BizNews about the Sanlam-EasyEquities deal and the backstory to how a tweet of all things kick-started the relationship between the two businesses…

Another startup is Apollo Agriculture which raised $6 million Series A, akin to Pula. Not only did the pair raise the same round, Apollo Agriculture and Pula both deal with providing financial resources to smallholder farmers.

Pula is solving this problem by using technology and data. Through its Area Yield Index Insurance product, the insurtech startup leverages machine learning, crop-cut experiments and data points relating to weather patterns and farmer losses, to build products that cater to various risks.But getting farmers on board has never been easy, Goslinga told TechCrunch. According to her, Pula has understood not to sell insurance directly to small-scale farmers, because they can suffer from optimism bias. “Some think a climate disaster wouldn’t hit their farms for a particular season; hence, they don’t ask for insurance initially. But if they witness any of these climate risks during the season, they would want to get insurance, which is counterproductive to Pula,” said the founder in a phone call.

Pula, a Kenyan insurtech startup that specialises in digital and agricultural insurance to derisk millions of smallholder farmers across Africa, has closed a Series A investment of $6 million.The round was led by Pan-African early-stage venture capital firm, TLcom Capital, with participation from nonprofit Women’s World Banking. The raise comes after Pula closed $1 million in seed investment from Rocher Participations with support from Accion Venture Lab, Omidyar Network and several angel investors in 2018.

If you look at mobile payments specifically, Africa is actually one of the leaders in this space.Kobus Ehlers, SnapScan, co-founderMeanwhile, Africa's smartphone market is expected to double over the following four years -- at the moment, South Africa is reportedly the biggest smartphone market in sub-Saharan Africa, with a 19% penetration.And as smartphones increase, the paying methods are also becoming smarter."If you look at mobile payments specifically, Africa is actually one of the leaders in this space," says Kobus Ehlers, co-founder of the SnapScan app. "SnapScan was developed in South Africa for the African market, so we try to find really local and relevant solutions and I think it's going to get a massive uptake," he adds.

Using your phone to pay for goods and services is nothing new in Africa, a continent where there are more than 720 million mobile phones. Services such as M-Pesa, the revolutionary Kenyan mobile payment system that allows people to bypass banks and pay bills, withdraw salaries and transfer cash electronically, have transformed the way people and business operate.

Over 2.5 billion of the world’s adults remain unbanked and have no access to formal banking or semiformal microfinance institutions according to a report by McKinsey.

Pula Advisors, a fintech firm reimagining agricultural insurance to protect smallholders worldwide, with operations in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Malawi has partnered with the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) to deploy satellite-based agricultural insurance to smallholder farmers in Nigeria who are estimated to be around 18 million. With the partnership, Pula will install satellite technology to track a wide range of catastrophes cost effectively, at speed and without missing out on any areas.

“We hope that the high-quality yield and satellite data available today will enable local insurers and Pula Advisors to create an innovative yield predictive model that decreases the cost of area yield index insurance. At the end of the day, we want to make this product more accessible to smallholder families, allowing them to invest with more confidence and increase their yields,” said Emilio Hernandez, who leads CGAP’s work with smallholders.

The new insurance product called Area Yield Index Insurance (AYII) by Pula Insurance will mitigate various risks being faced by smallholder farmers and is expected to cater for 14 million bags of fertilizers, among other insurance products for 3.9 million farmers by next year, and then 19 million farmers by 2025.

In the last decade, the impact of financial technology (fintech) on Africa's financial sector and other key sectors has been phenomenal. As a key driver of growth in the region, fintech is a viable alternative to traditional banking in urban and rural areas. In Africa, fintech creates an enabling environment that opens up the financial sector's value chain and promotes efficiency gains

The Impact of Mobile Payments on the Success and Growth of Micro-Business: The Case of M-Pesa in Kenya | Journal of Language, Technology & Entrepreneurship in Africa

Funded through a government innovation agency and a successful crowdsourcing campaign, the start-up has also won several awards and grants, including best start-up in 2014's Global Innovation through Science & Technology competition.Last year, it was chosen by the International Red Cross as a provider for its Fire Sensors initiative, a project that has distributed 900 of the devices along with extensive market research.Julie Arrighi, Innovation Advisor at the American Red Cross, said that using networked heat sensors like Lumkani is crucial to mitigating the growing risk of slum fires around the world.

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.

Nyagaka Anyona Ouko, a Kenyan from Nairobi, claims he is the innovator of M-Pesa and claims that Vodafone and its representatives stole the idea of Mobile Cash Transfer from him.

FarmDrive has also partnered with the ACP-EU Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Co-operation (CTA) to build the capacity of Kenyan young farmers and stakeholders and help them access finance.

Farm Drive has a wide variety of partners including: investors (Engineers without Borders and Mercy Corps); capacity building (Open Capital advisors, ACRE Africa -to create insurance products); and financial institutions (Musoni Kenya).

FarmDrive catalyzes financial institutions to lend more to smallholder farmers by de-risking the process through clear and transparent records. Farmer clients of FarmDrive are benefiting from financial awareness, financial management tools, farming-related recommendations, access to finance and links to profitable markets.

Visa has entered a partnership with Nigeria based startup Paga on payments and technology.Founded in Lagos, Paga scaled its fintech business in West Africa, before targeting expansion in Ethiopia and Mexico.The startup has created a multi-channel network for over 14 million customers in Nigeria to transfer money, pay-bills and buy things digitally through its mobile-app or 24,840 agents.The new arrangement allows Paga account holders to transact on Visa’s global network. It will also see both companies work together on tech.The collaboration reflects a strategy of the American financial services giant to expand in Africa working with the continent’s top startups.

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.