African Fintech Marches Ahead: A Review of the News updates in Mar '23
THE LOGUE- An African –focused Fintech Newsletter | Vol 17 | April 3rd 2023
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Let’s officially welcome you to April and the start of Q2. We hope the 1st 3 months of 2023 were productive for you. If it wasn’t , it's a good time for a fresh start. 📖👋
Every first week of a new month, we review the previous month and today is no different. This also means there will be no deep dive today.
To speed read our previous deep dives, scoot over to our medium page here.
3 things about 3 perspectives- what’s that?
To navigate the retrospective for last month, we will explore 3 perspectives where we highlight 3 interesting updates that happened under that category.
Here are the categories:
Production Innovation updates from the African Fintech scene.
Inspiring Expansion moves from Fintechs on the continent.
A collation of other important things around Funding & Regulator Activity.
Quite a feast right? But before we start, let’s look at last week’s news highlights showcasing 8 top headlines covering funding, expansion, product innovation, regulator activity and partnerships in the Fintech ecosystem in Africa.
The March News Review.
1. Innovation on African Fintech scene.
PAPSS transaction : PAPSS was formed to facilitate the integration of all payments systems together into one network that is interoperable, efficient and affordable. So far, they’ve been in pilot tests in 6 countries in the WAMZ region. Last week, they had their 1st Live transaction from GCB bank in Ghana to Stanbic IBTC in Nigeria. Officials from the banks confirmed that online processing and settlement were efficient. Congrats to all involved. 👏
The rise of SoftPOS : This is the tech that allows an NFC-enabled android device to accept contactless card payments. The lowers the barrier to Merchant acquiring as procuring and managing the POS hardware is a big constraint. This month 3 Fintechs rolled out related solutions to the market.
Kuda opened the floor relaunching SoftPOS to it’s business segment. PAYM8 in South Africa followed suit, rolling out the tap-on-phone variant, which was certified by Visa and Mastercard. Last week, the Card scheme giant Verve, also rolled out SoftPOS SDK solution, in partnership with Alcineo with a focus on SMEs .
Apple Pay later launched last week and immediately affected the market value of some of it’s competitors. Apple Pay is only issued in South Africa on the continent, though Fintechs like Paystack have enabled merchants to acquire from international customers in other Africa countries. Do you think it will have an effect on BNPL providers in Africa?
2. Inspiring Fintech growth activities.
Our Unicorns and Soonicorns keep inspiring us.
MFS Africa: An African Fintech veteran described MFS as an Octopus, and we can’t agree anymore . Riding on an impressive 400 million wallets, they are building out what is emerging as the African-wide payment rails we’ve dreamt of.
In March they partnered with the remittance giant Western Union to unlock cross-border transactions from 200 countries and territories!
As if that wasn’t enough, they recently partnered with Access Bank to expand the AccessAfrica service across their touchpoints. MFS Africa is available in 35 markets and Access Bank operates across 17 markets. Now that is what you call partnership!
Paymob might be unknown compared to other Egyptian Fintech giants, but they processed 87% of e-wallet transaction volumes in Egypt, with millions of e-wallet users using its IT infrastructure. Last March they clinched deals with Shahid( they control 85% of the VOD market in MENA) and IKEA, the retail giant.
Flutterwave : If there was an award category for the Fintech with the most licenses, Flutterwave will easily win it. Though it has been in the news for other matters, you can’t but admire their attempts at expanding their business in a compliant way. Recently, they copped up 2 licenses in Rwanda and 2 in Egypt as well.
3. Acquisitions, Funding & Regulator Activity.
In this last section we are going to look at a slew of other interesting things that happened last month.
Acquisitions : 2 Fintechs acquired 2 Fintechs 🙂,now that is a nice play on words. But for the specifics : FairMoney, a Nigerian credit-led digital bank, has acquired PayForce, a sub-brand of YC-backed CrowdForce. We are not aware of the sum, but we know PayForce is now a division in FairMoney. Also, all the way from Mauritius , Fin( A rather interesting name for a Fintech ), acquired South African housing finance provider, Thuthukani Housing Finance.
For Capital injection and funding, the African Development Bank Group led the news for approving a hefty $30M facility for Family bank Limited (FBL) in Kenya. The facility will be used to reduce the trade and SME finance gap in Kenya.
The Regulators were not left out in March. We featured the Central Banks of Nigeria, Egypt and Somalia, approving new guidelines for Open Banking, approving payment card services codes and rolling out IBAN bank codes respectively.
A major feature was the AACB , a gathering of all the Central Banks in Africa ( They’ve been around since 1963, when my parents hadn’t even met). They held their 1st meeting of the year in Dakar. But why is this important? well, part of the agenda was FinTech Regulation and Supervision! Watch out for more news on this.
Something to consider
A growing number of African nations are exploring direct currency relations with BRICS countries like China, India and Russia. In addition , the BRICs nations are exploring a unified currency. What effects do you foresee on cross-border payments and trade on the continent?
And we have come to the end of the March Review, let’s know if you found this roundup useful and what kind of updates you’d like.
Have a fantastic week ahead. 🥂
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