Spring 21 Capstone 640pm

Sopra Banking Software launches its Marketplace and consolidates its open FinTech ecosystem strategy

Fintech technology number one: The growing number of RegTech solutionsRegulatory technology is benefiting from recent groundbreaking fintech software innovations, creating automated solutions to manage regulation monitoring, compliance, and reporting. Keeping track of new restrictions in a single database is a comfortable way of adopting a financial institution to legal requirements.

Regtech is the management of regulatory processes within the financial industry through technology. The main functions of regtech include regulatory monitoring, reporting, and compliance. Regtech, or RegTech, consists of a group of companies that use cloud computing technology through software-as-a-service (SaaS) to help businesses comply with regulations efficiently and less expensively. Regtech is also known as regulatory technology. Financial institutions and regulators both use Regtech to deal with complicated compliance processes.

STARTUP WATCH- Fawry is officially Egypt’s first unicorn: EGX-listed e-payments firm Fawry became the first Egyptian tech company to hit a market cap of USD 1 bn on Monday after its share price reached intraday highs of EGP 22.69, former managing director Mohamed Okasha announced in a LinkedIn post. Fawry’s share price has increased by more than 300% since it debuted on the EGX last year, a rise that has accelerated in recent months as the use of its payment services skyrocketed during the lockdown.

Bismart was awarded seed capital of Sh1 million in April 2018 by Standard chartered Women in Tech programmed and office space for nine months at IBIZ Africa incubator, as the most innovative and scalable business model in Kenya.

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jul 9- GreenTec Capital, a German investment boutique focused on African start-ups, has entered into an investment agreement with Bismart, a Kenyan start-up insurance aggregator leveraging on digital platforms and technologies to educate and advice customers on the best insurance and investment solutions available in the Kenya market.

Fawry is a pioneering Electronic Payment Network, offering financial services to consumers and businesses through more than 65 thousand locations and a variety of channels. It offers a convenient and reliable way to pay bills and other services in multiple channels (online, using ATMs , mobile wallets and retail points) The company's network of retailers includes small groceries, pharmacies and stationaries, and post-offices, all equipped with point-of-sale machines – the same ones used for credit card payments

New technologies, like machine learning/artificial intelligence, predictive behavioral analytics, and data-driven marketing, will take the guesswork and habit out of financial decisions. "Learning" apps will not only learn the habits of users, often hidden to themselves, but will engage users in learning games to make their automatic, unconscious spending and saving decisions better. Fintech is also a keen adaptor of automated customer service technology, utilizing chatbots to and AI interfaces to assist customers with basic task and also keep down staffing costs. Fintech is also being leveraged to fight fraud by leveraging information about payment history to flag transactions that are outside the norm.

I always wondered why people would run away from insurance agents, yet insurance is a very important risk management tool. So, I joined insurance firstly, because I was tired of my job at the ICT company, and, secondly, because I wanted to investigate if what insurance agents were selling at the time was genuine.

The FinTech revolution captures the simultaneous attack of a large number of technologies, notably mobile telephones and blockchain, which are ushering in efficiency or outreach to multiple niche markets. The use of mobile telephone technology has expanded Internet reach to the excluded, created possibilities for business where banks were not historically present and is potentially disruptive.

AI-powered ChatbotsBanks and most of the businesses in the consumer industry have to deal with so many customer inquiries. It requires them to set up dedicated staff members or a complete call center to keep answering the questions that may not directly benefit their business. The artificial intelligence relieves the financial institutions in this hassle with modern-technology equipped chatbots. These virtual assistants are smart in understanding the user queries and providing them with the most viable answer.

Fawry's network processed 600.1 million transactions last year with a total value of 34.2 billion Egyptian pounds ($2.1 billion), EFG Hermes said in its statement.

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. Smartel money 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.Smartel Money provides the above via the My Wallet (TM) service which comprises a numerous tailored solutions both for businesses, organisations and end customers. For more information visit our website in the link given below.

Due to the ubiquitous nature of information on the Internet, clients are more informed about and resultantly more demanding of personalised banking solutions. This is especially prevalent among younger consumers who do not know a world without the Internet and smart devices. The millennials (those born between 1980 and 2000) in particular exhibit dramatically different buying patterns and consumption expectations than older generations such as the baby boomers (KPMG 2017).

Customers wanting a magazine who have no cash on them can download a free app [many people in South Africa use SnapScan daily for other transactions so already have the app], that allows them to scan the vendor’s QR code to pay for the magazine.

Fawry, however, is the first-ever African fintech startup to go public through an IPO (Initial Public Offering) on African soil. Fawry went public, last year August, on The Egyptian Exchange (EGX) in the first Egyptian IPO of the year, offering 36 percent (254.6 million) of its shares on The Egyptian Exchange to raise EGP 1.64 billion ($100 million). The offering also comprised of a secondary sale by Netherland Holding BV. The company’s shares that were listed at the price of EGP 6.46 soared 31 percent to close at EGP 8.48 on the first day of trading, which gave the company a market cap close to EGP 6 billion or $366 million. Since then, its stock price has increased by over 300 percent.

The rise of Fintech challenges established financial centres and incumbent financial institutions to rethink their strategies to remain obligatory passage points in the age of digitizing finance. To appreciate these changes, it is important to maintain theoretical interchange between developments in financial geography and economic geography, its parent discipline

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.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the pricing strategies of French FinTech Firms (FFFs) using quantitative descriptive and correlational research methods. Based on a representative sample of 246 FFF, the study provided consistent support for the hypotheses, which argues that FFFs with high price-setting power may implement a combination of the price-setting strategy (PSS) “skimming” and the price-setting practice (PSP) “value-informed”. FFFs applying “market-based” PSSs tend to use “competition-informed” PSP preferring “pay-per-use” price-setting model (PSM). Whilst FFFs who apply “penetration” PSS tend to use “cost-informed” PSP and “pay-per-use” PSM. The findings support founders and senior management in their pricing decisions. This paper contributes to the existing literature on pricing strategies of early-stage high-tech companies. There is a need for further research about the change of pricing strategies during the lifecycle of a firm using for example a longitudinal quantitative study.

Distributed-ledger technology (DLT) enables safer, faster and cheaper transactions in an ever-increasing number of sectors. The Commission considers DLT as a breakthrough technology that is key for the EU's competitiveness.

Bismart, a Kenyan insure-tech company has unveiled an online e-commerce platform that will enable insurance companies, brokers and agents to connect with their customer’s end- to- end. Known as Pamsmart, the cloud-based platform will allow different players to create products relevant to specific target group and businesses.