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“We are excited to partner with Visa, a leader in payments globally, as they are constantly building world-class solutions for consumers and businesses. Our goals are well-aligned. As we scale our wallet across emerging markets such as Nigeria, Mexico and Ethiopia, partnering with Visa to give both consumers and businesses, who have been underserved, access to Visa’s global network made sense to us,” the company said in a press release.

According to Oviosu, Visa and Paga’s engineering teams have already started working together and Paga expects to roll-out these new options in Nigeria sometime in second-quarter 2020.

“Based on the partnership, we’re going to launch QR codes and NFC [payments] into the market in Nigeria — alternative ways of receiving payments than bringing out a physical card,” said Oviosu.

Arguably the bank’s most well-known fintech acquisition in recent years is the QR code payment app SnapScan. In 2016 the bank acquired a majority share of Firepay, the company behind Snapscan, for an undisclosed stake.Firepay, which was co-founded in 2013 through startup incubator FireID by Kobus Ehlers and Malan and Philip Joubert among others, launched the SnapScan app in partnership with Standard Bank in 2014.

Helios completed the acquisition of a 76% stake in TPAY, a fast growing direct carrier billing provider in the Middle East and North Africa from A15, a leading tech investment fund based in Egypt. With offices in Cairo and the UAE, TPAY currently operates across 16 countries with almost half of its total transaction volume coming from African markets such as Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.

TPAY provides a much-needed mobile payment solution in markets with low banking penetration and high mobile adoption.

Helios completed the acquisition of a 76% stake in TPAY, a fast growing direct carrier billing provider in the Middle East and North Africa from A15, a leading tech investment fund based in Egypt. With offices in Cairo and the UAE, TPAY currently operates across 16 countries with almost half of its total transaction volume coming from African markets such as Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.

Mubawab, Morocco’s leading real estate portal acquired by EMPG in May 2018, has announced the acquisition of Jumia’s acclaimed property listings website Jumia House for the North African (specifically Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria) region. “The acquisition consolidates Mubawab’s position as the region’s leading real estate website, while providing access to the most promising real estate markets in the Maghreb, with more than 90 million people,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.

The early-stage fintechs in the Inclusive Fintech 50 sample are increasing their use of digital acquisition channels, such as Facebook, to market their products. Qualitative findings point to an increased use of targeted social media campaigns, webinars, and other online marketing strategies such as email campaigns or WhatsApp chat room for clients — indicating that these channels are cheaper than TV and print media and likely more effective.

A consortium of international financial investors comprising the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund (“EAEF”), Helios Investment Partners (“Helios”, acting on behalf of funds it advises) and the MENA Long-Term Value Fund (“MENA LTV”) (together, the “Consortium”) today announced it has acquired a majority stake in Fawry, the leading electronic bill presentment and payment platform in Egypt at a purchase price valuing the company at EGP 773 million, approximately US$ 100 million.Headquartered in Cairo, Fawry provides users with a secure electronic bill presentment and payment services solution, connecting consumers, merchants, governments and financial institutions on a consolidated gateway that is accessible through multiple channels, including Point of Sale (POS) machines, ATMs, post offices, online and through mobile wallets.  Since its establishment in 2009, Fawry has been at the forefront of electronic payments in Egypt, providing pioneering, innovative and convenient payment solutions to its customers. The company today processes over one million transactions a day and operates a network of over 50,000 collection points in 300 cities and suburbs across the country.

Developer of mobile payment application designed to help users to make quick and easy payment through their mobile phones. The company's application services include easy sign up, affordable, convenient, easy payment reconciliation and simple payment notification, enabling users to make making easy payments for purchasing goods and services online.

SnapScan General Information

Nigerian fintech startup Paga, poised for global expansion, has announced its acquisition of Apposit, a United States (US)-based technology company with operations in Ethiopia. Founded in 2009, Paga provides Nigerians with safe and convenient ways of making payments, allowing money to be sent to any phone number for the beneficiary to redeem at a Paga agent or at an ATM via a cardless withdrawal. Customers can also use Paga to deposit money to bank accounts in Nigeria, pay their bills, or top-up mobile phone airtime.

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.

Whether fintechs ultimately win or lose significant market share may be beside the point; they are redefining customer expectations and continue to create new business models. As fintechs are frequently building their entire technology stacks from the ground up, they are highlighting incumbent financial institutions’ weaknesses not only in digital user experiences but also in operational efficiency. Whether a new digital brokerage wins or loses may not matter when customer expectations around brokerage fees change. A retail foreign-exchange fintech having 5 or 50 percent of the market may matter less than retail FX margins disappearing for everyone. Whether the next crops of “neobanks” disrupt retail banking may be less important than their highlighting for users and customers the possibilities of a modern, digital-first experience.

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.

M-Pesa is Africa's most successful mobile money service and the region’s largest fintech platform. M-Pesa is the preferred way to make payments across the continent both for the banked and unbanked due to its safety and unmatched convenience.

It also provides financial services to millions of people who have mobile phones, but do not have bank accounts, or only have limited access to banking services. Now, M-Pesa provides over 42 million people with a safe, secure and affordable way to send and receive money, top-up airtime, make bill payments, receive salaries, get short-term loans and much more.

In early 2020, Vodacom & Safaricom completed the acquisition of the M-Pesa brand from Vodafone Group through a newly created joint venture. The joint venture will accelerate the growth of M-Pesa through Africa by giving both Vodacom and Safaricom full control of the M-Pesa brand, product development and support services as well as the opportunity to expand M-Pesa into new African markets

In 2012, two brothers, Chijioke Dozie and Ngozi Dozie, founded Carbon, a Nigerian digital bank start-up. Carbon began as a digital lending company, but now the company provides a variety of services, from payments to savings to investments. According to Dozie, “Our annual report will be released in the second quarter after our financial audit is complete, to gain customer trust, Chijioke Dozie, the CEO, told ProWellTech in 2019 that the company will make Carbon’s financials public.” If you note, before we published the 2019 fiscal year update, we released a year under review in January 2020.Gross profits, profit or loss before and after tax, liabilities and equity, total assets, etc. are included in Carbon’s annual report. Carbon’s year of analysis reveals processed payments, client base, disbursed loans, and investments made on the platform. The business with about 659,000 customers processed N96.54 billion (~$241.35 million) according to Carbon’s year of analysis for fiscal year 2020, which is up 89 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. N25.51 billion (~$63 million) was the disbursement volume for its lending arm, an improvement of 9.1 percent from the 2019 financial year. Investments worth N13.02 billion (~32.55 million) were made on the site, up by 365 percent from FY 2019.The factors that affected these numbers last year, according to the company, included the launch of an iOS app that pushed clients Acquisition, introducing its feature for low-income customers with USSD banking services; and a social chat feature to allow faster transactions. Besides that, Carbon obtained a microfinance bank license in an attempt to become a digital bank. The license implies, according to Dozie, that Carbon’s customers are given additional protection by the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation through depositor insurance. The standard Carbon wallet is now a full-fledged bank account, Dozie says, and clients will transact on the platform like any bank would.