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Thndr recently acquired the necessary licensing from the Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA) making the fast-growing startup the first company to acquire a brokerage license in Egypt since 2008. 

“ Our vision is to put wealth in the hands of everyday individuals. With the rise of technology, and the foresight of a very supportive Financial Regulatory Authority, we can make this vision come to life — Egypt is expected to be the 7th largest economy by 2030 and has more than 100 mn people, most of which are young and are looking for a convenient and digital way to invest their money. That’s why we are excited to bring a new breed of young investors to the market.” 

Jamiipay has been a part of the Accelerace accelerator program, that help startup companies accelerate and scale up their business model and finetune their companies. Jamiipay is one of more than 500 companies that Accelerace already have accelerated.

“Our customers have been asking for a Mukuru App, and we have made sure to develop and present a solution that empowers our customers to send money back home to their families in an even safer and more convenient way. Mukuru has always given its customers the ability to transact when and wherever they need to through our existing USSD and WhatsApp offerings – the Mukuru App adds a richer experience and more control for a customer to manage their profile,”

“Our customers have been asking for a Mukuru App, and we have made sure to develop and present a solution that empowers our customers to send money back home to their families in an even safer and more convenient way. Mukuru has always given its customers the ability to transact when and wherever they need to through our existing USSD and WhatsApp offerings – the Mukuru App adds a richer experience and more control for a customer to manage their profile,”

The announcement was made at the 2017 LendIt USA Conference in New York. The three investment transactions include Series C financing round in Trumid, an electronic trading platform for the bond market; Series B financing round in WeConvene, an online corporate access management ERP provider for capital markets; and Seed Round financing round in WorldCover, an innovative peer-to-peer insurance network.

Always a step ahead of the game when it comes to finding innovative solutions to keep their customers satisfied, our smart friends over at EasyEquities partnered with InvestSure in 2018 to provide a safety net for a selection of shares in their portfolio.

African agriculture, especially small farms, have not had it easy over the past few years. Droughts, pests, floods, and local conflict have exacerbated challenges for many food producers. This is why insurtech startup Pula is working to provide small farmers with insurance to help manage the implications of climate change and other environmental uncertainties. The startup begins the farming season by sending representatives to farms to gauge the potential yield of the season. Pula then sends this estimate to insurance companies to generate a policy offer. According to Pula, the initiative has been so successful because in every African country they have worked in, there are insurance companies willing to support their initiative.

Smartel Money LTD is an e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the modern ICT platforms as well as using the mobile and non-mobile platforms as well as using the freely downloaded applications. It is an internet based e-commerce payment system, which intends to be a payment processor for online vendors as well as click and brick businesses, auction sites, grocers and other commercial users, for which it charges a fee. The government of Lesotho has announced plans to reduce the handling of cash and replacing it with a digital payment system, in a bid to reduce the spread of Covid-19. Smartel Money is one of five mobile money issuers in the country. Their aim is to help businesses and individuals. They provide full business systems platforms, full personal systems of the use of mobile money.

Smartel Money LTD held a public awareness initiative last Friday, aimed at aiding businesses and the general public towards a cashless society.

Smartel Money LTD is an e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the modern ICT platforms as well as using the mobile and non-mobile platforms as well as using the freely downloaded applications. It is an internet based e-commerce payment system, which intends to be a payment processor for online vendors as well as click and brick businesses, auction sites, grocers and other commercial users, for which it charges a fee.

This is not a full list of hot agritech startups in Africa. But when you add Pula – a Kenyan farm insurance startup – to the above, it shows the variety of data-driven innovations aiming to re-organise and fill gaps across the agricultural value chain. From farm to factory to food.

Funding Pula: Insuretech Startup Closes $6M Series A Funding to Scale Up Business Across Africa 0 SharesShareTweetSharePin The African Insuretech service provider, Pula, has recently closed a US$6 million Series A funding round led by TLcom Capital and had participation from Women’s World Banking. It specializes in digital as well as agric insurance to derisk smallholder farmers across Africa. This new round of investment to the insuretech startup will be used to scale up operations in the company’s existing 13 markets across Africa. Pula has so far impacted over 4.3 million farmers on the continent and the new funding will help push its expansion into Asia to power resilience and profitability for Asian smallholder farmers. Pula was launched by Rose Goslinga and Thomas Njeru in 2015, to design and deliver innovative agricultural insurance and digital products to help smallholders farmers improve their farming practices, endure climate risks and bolster their incomes. This has become necessary because for smallholder farmers in emerging markets, the traditional method of calculating insurance through farm visits is often expensive, meaning they are often neglected from financial protection against climate risks.

Two weeks ago a Kenyan fintech provider PULA was among 20 finalists pitching at the Singapore Fintech Festival. The presentation by the CTO Sitati Kituyi was selected among the winners, enabling the company to walk away with a cash prize of USD 50,000, getting an exclusive opportunity for networking with investors and a fast-tracked application for the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Financial Sector Technology and Innovation (FSTI) Proof-of-Concept Scheme. Pula ‘restructures agricultural insurance and seeks to use technology to insure the previously unbanked, uninsured and untapped market of smallhodlers across the globe. It facilitates crop and livestock insurance coverage and works with Fortune 500 companies, global NGOs, research institutions, and governments to help provide smallholders the protection they need in an increasingly unpredictable market.’ The finalists who eventually pitched for the Global Fintech Hackcelerator were selected through two parallel scouting programmes. The local programme which aimed to tackle problem statements originating from the financial industry in Singapore and the broader Asia region saw 10 winners shortlisted from among 200 submissions by companies across 30 countries.

“With Masterpass, we’re enabling consumers to make secure and simple everyday payments wherever they are and from any connected device, without needing to physically carry their bank cards with them,” says Mark Elliott, Division President, Mastercard, South Africa. “Thanks to our collaboration with SnapScan, we are pleased to offer consumers even more places to pay using Masterpass, which is now the most widely accepted digital wallet in South Africa.”Since its launch in 2013, SnapScan has grown its acceptance exponentially, especially among small businesses that traditionally did not have access to traditional Point of Sale devices and relied on cash payments. It makes accepting digital card payments cheap and easy, with merchants simply needing to display a QR code at the till, online or on a bill.“Given SnapScan’s extensive acceptance footprint, the ability to offer merchants a single QR code, which will accept payment from multiple mobile wallet solutions such as Masterpass, is the driving force behind creating interoperability,” says Lincoln Mali, head of group card and payments at Standard Bank. “We believe that interoperability between digital payments platforms is one of the keys to driving digital payments usage and acceptance in South Africa.”

Each Masterpass transaction is classified as an Authenticated Mobile Transaction by South African banks, ensuring that consumers enjoy the highest protection from fraudsters.

The fintech industry is lagging behind in cloud adoption. The industry as a whole was cautious about moving information to the cloud due to security concerns. However, the adoption of cloud technology is accelerating.Public cloud adoption has many benefits for financial businesses. The cloud provides a faster way to deliver services to consumers. Companies have to invest less capital.It streamlines operations and helps build consumer-centric processes. According to a PWC report, the public cloud will be the main infrastructure model for financial services by 2020.

Yes! SnapScan is safe to use on multiple levels: The app requires a PIN to be entered before any transaction can be completed. This prevents anyone who has your phone from making transactions, as your PIN should be known only to you.  Your card details are also encrypted and stored safely and securely on your phone. Even if your phone is stolen, nobody will be able to see or access your card details.

SnapScan is a new innovative mobile payment App on a smartphone. It provides a cashless, card-less payment app that consumers can use at thousands of merchants across South Africa or to make donations to CANSA.  It can be used for customers of any bank in South Africa (not just Standard Bank).

SnapScan wants to see a cashless, frictionless society. For the customer, the app poses an alternative to cash and credit cards because it’s faster. Customers don’t need to wait in a queue, or for the PoS terminal to finish processing their payment. You can simply take a picture of the merchant’s unique QR code, enter the amount, and they’ll be notified either via SMS or their PoS system. The merchant can set up the system in five minutes (SnapScan claims) with no hardware required other than a mobile phone. This means that any person selling apples on the street to a department store can integrate SnapScan. There are also fewer costs involved compared to setting up a credit card terminal, the only charge being a 3% transaction fee. Secondly, it’s meant to be more secure. With SnapScan’s method of payment, the merchant never has to handle your details or card. The app user’s card details are stored on their smartphones and protected with their personal PIN codes.

This week, SnapScan rolled its app out to The Big Issue vendors across South Africa, the non-profit magazine that’s usually sold at intersections in urban areas. People with the app can now purchase the latest issue by simply taking a photo of a QR code and typing in the amount they want to pay. There’s no hassle of fiddling for your wallet or looking for change lying around in the car before the light turns green.

Latest figures put the value of the cryptocurrency market at almost $240bn in 2019, nearly double the 2018 figure of $128bn. Could this mean that the global crypto market is starting to move into the mainstream? Significantly, the sector is enjoying rapid growth globally, with the UK, Nigeria, Australia, Canada, Mexico and India all experiencing a recent surge in users. Crypto is also starting to attract interest from institutional investors, which see it as possible insurance against the global rise in quantitative easing.

The big banking brands have shown little interest in cryptocurrency to date. In part, this is due to their general aversion to high levels of risk and an institutionalised culture ill suited to digital change and innovation – but there is also a legitimate fear that they will fall foul of financial regulators. 

It stands to reason that cryptocurrency exchanges are well positioned and strongly motivated to exploit the narrowing gap between crypto and fiat – because they have first-move advantage. Having already built huge cash reserves and crypto-familiar customer bases, it would be relatively straightforward technically for them to add on banking services. 

Jason has over 20 years of executive product and general management experience helping early-stage and growth-stage companies build and deliver innovative products and experiences. Prior to Kiva, Jason spent 7 years at Minted. There, he led the Product Management and Design teams after running Growth, Digital Products, and Customer Operations. He began his career at Yodlee where he eventually led global engineering and custom products, then moved on to establish and lead the product teams at Lift Media and Extole.

Neville Crawley, Chief Executive Officer, Kiva Neville joined Kiva as CEO in the fall of 2017. He brings nearly 2 decades of experience leading global business and technology ventures, most recently as the CEO of Quid, a platform that analyzes the world's collective intelligence to help answer strategic questions. During Neville’s career he has worked in China, Nigeria, Brazil, Malaysia and across the Middle East, including 4 years working for McKinsey & Company and as the publisher of China Economic Review. Board member since 2017

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frica is one of the world’s hot regions for insurance. Steady economic growth in most countries combined with a largely underdeveloped insurance sector have positioned the continent as the second-fastest-growing region for insurance globally after Latin America.

Kiva receives a broad range of support from a diverse set of corporations and foundations. From discounted services and free software, to grants and financial backing, Kiva is grateful for each partner that helps us achieve our mission of expanding financial access to help underserved communities thrive. (Please note that the corporations and foundations listed have made contributions of either grants, loan funds, equipment or services in the last 30 months.)