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While many view Mukuru as a technology company, its business is centred around helping people at a very personal level. From humble beginnings in a London flat in 2005 to an African fintech giant in 2020, Mukuru's journey has been one of turning challenges into opportunities for innovation - continuously motivated by a desire to improve the daily lives of its loyal customers.

Agri-tech startup in Kenya, FarmDrive has gotten access to more finance as its operations recently faced expansion to make provision for 3 million shareholders farmers.

“It’s about using insurance to get rid of risk for these farmers and unlock opportunities for them,” Chris says. He says that research found that for farmers who received insurance (rather than cash grants) borrowed and invested more in their farms.

Founded in 2004, Mukuru has established a powerful brand affinity with customers built on trust, reliability, and local engagement. The company has grown to operate over 90 remittance corridors, enabling more than 5 million individuals to receive funds to cover living expenses, school fees, medical expenses, and utility bills. Mukuru is supported by world-class regulatory and compliance systems, highly scalable technology architecture, and a comprehensive sales and distribution network.

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.

Founded in January 2015, WorldCover is a US-based insurance technology company that uses a peer-to-peer model to provide farmers in developing worlds with crop insurance against natural disasters and provides investors with diversified returns from the non-traditional financial markets.

The partnership between Family Bank Limited and London-based financial technology firm SimbaPay will enable the 23,946,174 active M-Pesa users in Kenya to send money to over 1 billion active WeChat subscribers in China.

Fawry for Banking Technology and Electronic Payment SAE Extraordinary Shareholders Meeting

Fawry Shareholders Approve To Sell 1000 Shares In Fawry Dahab Electronic Services To Banque Misr

SimbaPay (UK, focussed on Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda) – "Send money to family and friends bank accounts or mobile wallets in Africa (from abroad) in a convenient and cheap way. Customers can also use their bill settlement technology to pay merchants in Africa (such as universities, utilities). You can also open a bank account back home using the app".

The banks and financial institutions are happy to use the advantages of secure storage, interoperability, scalability, and 24/7 uptime without heavy investments. This also means that scaling your business to higher user demand is much easier due to the fact that it only takes upgrading the data package that the company is contracted to use. No need to hire, train, and re-train any employees.

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.

Fawry for Banking & Payment Technology Services SAE, an Egyptian digital payments provider, was listed on Cairo’s exchange about a year back. The company recently experienced a 300% increase in its market value to 20 billion Egyptian pounds (appr. $1.3 billion). The payments firm confirmed that its valuation has grown 4x since the COVID-19 outbreak in late February 2020. As first reported by Bloomberg, Fawry is now ranked among Egypt’s 10 most valuable firms, which include Telecom Egypt Co. and Elswedy Electric Co. However, these businesses are generating a lot more revenue compared to Fawry for now. Many locals in Egypt are still settling transactions with cash payments, despite the Coronavirus crisis which has made it unsafe to handle paper currency notes. However, the nation’s reserve bank has asked lending platforms and other financial service providers to encourage residents to make digital payments via mobile wallets. The central bank also wants Egyptians to use online payment platforms like Fawry in order to limit physical contact, so that the virus doesn’t spread further.

With Apple introducing the biometrics technologies like Fingerprint identification and now facial recognition on its latest X series phones, biometrics is not only a day-to-day part of consumers’ lifestyles but also opening a whole new doors to biometrics industries and consumers’ financial operating methods.Companies like FIDO Alliance pulling out all the stops to make the biometrics systems standardized and more secured introduces the world to the new era of FinTech with easier, secured and adaptable approach of Biometrics Finances.

The tiresome process of entering long and complicated passwords and initials at every transaction along with the risk of compromising the security of the consumers’ accounts played a major role in accepting the Facial Recognition, Fingerprint scanner, IRIS Sensor and Voice recognition as a method of authentication at a Banking sector. 

Cloud eliminates many data storage management problems that plague dated enterprise infrastructure. Cloud computing in banking offers easy access to data for regulatory reporting, risk mitigation, analytics, deep learning, and discovering risk management anomalies.

Cloud based financial services can scale to meet variable and increasing data volume. Plus clean, consolidated, contextualized data eliminates the blinders caused by data silos. Additionally, on-premise grids typically force banks to allocate compute resources while cloud resources are available on-demand.

Open banking promotes banking and payments technology standardization, drives competition, enhances security of customer account data, and leads to data use innovation. APIs simplify the way financial institutions collect actionable data (e.g. customer purchasing, loan needs, preferred journey patterns, risk profiles, and future income projections).

Moving forward, banks are now able to partner with fintech startups with ease. Most noteworthy, startups are developing as cloud-native from the very start. The global fintech market size expects to grow to $124.3 billion USD by the end of 2025 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 23.84%

As an increasing number of businesses make the move to adopt a digital payment system, the demand for fintech solutions is only expected to grow and drive market growth.

Neobanks emerged — young banks licensed (often from a traditional institution) and a modern core banking system that allowed them to operate and scale faster while spending much less on customer service. Neobanks started to grow like startups — building only relevant products, nailing marketing. The rebundling phase was under way.

The next wave currently underway is niche fintech. Due to a dramatic reduction in the cost of launching technology startups (500 times in 20 years), focusing on product group for very specific user personas (teens, retirees, SMEs) became possible. Thanks to their precise relevance, these fintechs enjoy higher customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Created in 2015 in Cape Town by Andrew Watkins-Ball, the company, which specializes in savings, loans and insurance for people and small businesses far from the traditional banking system, has raised $55 million (50 million euro) in debt and venture capital from the American bank.

Created in 2015 in Cape Town by Andrew Watkins-Ball, the company, which specializes in savings, loans and insurance for people and small businesses far from the traditional banking system, has raised $55 million (50 million euro) in debt and venture capital from the American bank.

The company has raised nearly $146 million since its creation from renowned players such as Google, which integrated Jumo into its accelerator in May 2017, the Mastercard foundation, development institutions such as Finnfund and Proparco (the private branch of the French Development Agency).

Also, in its quest to become a digital bank, Carbon acquired a microfinance bank license. According to Dozie, the license means that Carbon’s customers are afforded additional protection through depositors’ insurance via the NDIC. The Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation, a federal insurance agency, protects depositors and guarantees the settlement of insured funds when a financial institution can no longer repay their deposits. With that in place, Dozie says the typical Carbon wallet is now a full-fledged bank account, and customers can perform transactions on the platform as they would with any bank.Like Carbon, other startups on the continent have followed suit by releasing year-on-year metrics. In recent memory, most of these startups play in the fintech and crypto-exchange space. But Carbon remains unique amongst this crop of companies as it releases both transaction stats and real insights into its financial performance.Whereas transaction stats tend to highlight a seemingly explosive year-on-year growth of a company, a comprehensive view of financials will likely show a mixed performance. For instance, Carbon generated $17.5 million in revenue for FY2019, up 68% from 2018. For that same period, it recorded a 23% decrease in its profit after tax numbers, a 222% rise in total liabilities and 107% increase in assets finishing the year off with a 6% increase in total equity.It’ll be interesting to see what these numbers look like for 2020. But that’s not the only event to keep an eye on. In addition to its $10 million Series A from SA-based Net1 UEPS Technologies and a $5million debt financing in 2019 from Lendable, Dozie says the digital bank, which also has a presence in Kenya, is ramping efforts to raise a Series B round soon to consolidate its position on the continent.

In 2018, Carbon, a Nigerian fintech startup, made its financials public for the first time. Although typical for foreign private startups, it’s almost an anomaly in Africa. There have been rare cases in the past, for instance, when Rocket Internet had to include Jumia’s financials in its yearly reports after going public. At the time, the German investment outfit was a founding shareholder in the African-based unicorn.

Nigerian digital bank Carbon hit $240M in payments processed last year, up 89% from 2019

AgroCenta brings all the stakeholders in Ghana’s agricultural value chain together to facilitate effective trading within its web and mobile platform. They target rural smallholder farmers and farmer-based organizations that have limited access to markets, logistics, or technology. AgroCenta works to improve the livelihoods of farmers by providing an all-in-one SMS based solution to access commodity pricing, offer goods for sale across Ghana, and an on-demand logistics service to ensure timely deliveries.

Business Model