One of Kenya’s leading fintech Asilimia has embarked on a very ambitious project aimed at making available a digital ledger app to allow MSME owners to manage their transactions in real-time. This project according to the company will give business owners direct access to a payment infrastructure specifically tailored to their needs via their mobile phone, eliminating tedious registration processes and allowing them to easily send money at scale, invest savings on transaction fees into insurance or business loans, gain insights into their finances, and minimise payment fraud.
Asilimia Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Tekwane Mwendwa
Asilimia which was founded over three years ago aims to empower small businesses through an affordable, easy-to-use and tailored digital payments platform. It has now launched Leja, a digital ledger app that allows business owners to manage their transactions in real-time. Using Leja, business owners can create simple cash-based accounting P&L records as well as keep a ledger of outstanding debits and credits while requiring zero technical or accounting knowledge.
Speaking on the development, the co-founder of the fintech startup and its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Tekwane Mwendwa expressed optimism saying that “it has come at an excellent moment to support our users formalise and digitise their business transactions as it will now be easy for them to track their sales and expenses and also follow up on what they are owed by customers.”
The app users will also get to enjoy an integrated mobile money infrastructure that allows them to send and receive online payments with reduced transaction fees by up to 90 per cent, which can be channelled to access insurance and high value loans. Asilimia’s growing active subscribers have to date recorded transactions with a value of more than US$17 million.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
Global cybersecurity firm Kaskersky has warned that there is looming cybersecurity danger as a quarter of users in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria are attacked by malware hiding within their devices. According to Kaspersky, in 2020, 25% of Kaspersky private users in South Africa, 40% in Kenya and 38% in Nigeria were attacked by such threats.
Denis Parinov, a cybersecurity expert at Kaspersky.
Kaspersky notes that there is a common misconception that the most dangerous threats to encounter on modern users’ digital journeys are likely to appear during Internet surfing. The reality however, based on the most recent analysis of cyberattacks in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria within 2020 by Kaspersky experts demonstrates that users are in fact more likely to face malware related attacks hidden within their devices.
Such threats are classified as ‘local’, which means they are detected either on user’s devices or on portable data storage devices, such as flash drives. In 2020, 25% of Kaspersky private users in South Africa, 40% in Kenya and 38% in Nigeria were attacked by such threats. To provide a comparison, web attacks only affected 9% of users in South Africa, 11% in Kenya and 8% in Nigeria.
When looking at corporate users in these regions, the numbers are similar: 23% of corporate users in South Africa, 29% in Kenya and 35% in Nigeria encountered such local threats within 2020. Unfortunately, there has been an increase in the sophistication of such threats – which may be hiding on the user’s device within a seemingly legitimate file for a while, to fly under the radar, and only strike later.
“The cyber threat landscape across Africa is constantly evolving,” says Denis Parinov, a cybersecurity expert at Kaspersky. “A few years ago, there were much more drive-by attacks – cases when different malicious software is downloaded and being run while the user simply browses the Internet. Nowadays, most of the web-threats “stays in browser”: they specialise in content replacement, browser locking or clickjacking, online-skimming, cookie stuffing, etc.
Now the situation when a user could download a malicious file directly is not too often. It’s more common for a malware to be disguised as something else to hide from the security solutions, remaining an unseen threat to users. The good news however is that modern security solutions are too advanced for such malware to fly under radars – it is more likely to be blocked either during the initial scan of the file by a security solution that happens by default, or within the very moment such programs attempt to launch.”
To protect against cyber threats including malware, Kaspersky recommends keeping to the following guidelines:
Do not follow dubious links from letters, messages in instant messengers or SMS
Regularly install updates for the operating system and applications
Install applications only from official stores
Use complex and different passwords for accounts
Regularly copy important data from your device to the cloud, to a USB flash drive or hard drive
Do not give applications access to those functions that they do not need and always install a reliable security solution such as Kaspersky Internet Security
In addition, companies are encouraged to provide training to improve cyber literacy among their employees. For example, the automated platform Kaspersky ASAP helps to develop safe behaviour skills and form sustainable cybersecurity habits. The solution allows the company to assess the current knowledge of an employee in the field of cybersecurity, and in accordance with this, determine the set of skills that the employee needs, depending on job duties and risk profile, and build a timetable for the program.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
As African startups make inroads into fintechs, the biggest opportunities are in savings, wealth management and insurance. This was the opinion of the chief executive officer (CEO) of Africa’s largest mobile money operator, M-Pesa Africa who says that there is still ample room for growth for mobile money throughout Africa, according to Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, interim CEO of M-Pesa Africa.
According to Lopokoiyit the future of mobile money in Africa is fantastic. “We are leapfrogging the card generation and going straight into digital financial services and payments.”
Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, interim CEO of M-Pesa Africa
It could be recalled that Kenya’s leading telecoms operator Safaricom launched the revolutionary mobile money platform M-Pesa in 2007, a step many doubted its viability then. M-Pesa which bypassed the traditional banking system allows subscribers to transfer money between one another and deposit and withdraw cash through a network of agents. The service has presently been expanded to several other African countries and the CEO believes that the future growth in the fintech space resides within the provision of financial health solutions.
“On financial inclusion when M-Pesa started, it was about 23% [in Kenya]. In places like Kenya, it is [now] 84% and above; in Tanzania, it is about 70%. But while that has been really good, financial health has remained relatively low … at about 20%. In this area of fintech and mobile money, we need to start looking at areas in which we can provide savings, wealth management and insurance to be able to cushion customers on the shocks that they may have as they live their lives,” he said.
Covid-19, said Lopokoiyit, has, once again, made the impact of external shocks on financial health abundantly clear. He wants fintech players to be more innovative in developing these solutions and finding ways to make financial products – even those such as government bonds – available to a wider range of customers. M-Pesa is hoping to encourage this innovation by opening its platform even more to third party developers.
“How do we encourage more developers and fintech to come into our ecosystem and innovate?” he asked. “Today in Kenya, there are 29,000 developers on our platform. I would like to see 100,000 developers across Africa use our APIs to develop innovative products and services.”
Referencing the recent announcement that Silicon Valley financial services company Stripe had acquired Nigerian start-up Paystack, Lopokoiyit explained partnerships of this nature are key for African fintech companies to get the valuations they deserve. “If you look at the talent that is being recruited from Africa by the big tech companies it shows that there is potential.”
The intention to establish M-Pesa as a super app that will feature various services such as transport, tourism, e-commerce and utility payments on one platform, was reiterated by Lopokoiyit. He believes partners would be able to publish their offering onto the super app, immediately adding value to the M-Pesa subscriber (more choice) and providing 40 million potential customers to the partner (access to market). “I want customers to look at [the M-Pesa app] as much as they look at WhatsApp on a daily basis, or Instagram.”
Lopokoiyit wants fintech companies and innovative start-ups to embrace engagement with regulators in their jurisdictions. “We work with them every single time. There is no product and service that we launch without the regulator. We actually have discovered it is better to, even on a concept stage, to engage the regulator.”
He further touted the importance of considering a regulator’s perspective when they fulfil their mandate to protect the consumer from systemic risk. “We are commercially driven, we are about transforming lives, but the regulators look at it from a bigger and broader scope; they interact with other regulators across the world, so they do add a lot of value,” he said.
According to Lopokoiyit, Covid-19 pandemic was a the great accelerant for businesses because the impact Covid-19 has had on digital financial services has led to the speed up of adoption, as well as regulatory change and innovation.
There are three phases when looking at the impact of Covid-19, he explained. First, there was the response period from March 2020 when most countries went into hard lockdowns. During this time, various businesses, regulators and governments were looking specifically at how they could assist communities. “We worked, for example, with central banks on lowering or zero-rating transaction fees below $10 to drive more financial inclusion,” he said. Other projects included working with governments to enable disbursements of much-needed relief finance to vulnerable communities. “That showed the impact of mobile money especially in Africa.”
The second phase is one of rebuilding. “This is really critical for the future of businesses in Africa. As we open up, how we look at SMEs and micro-SMEs; how can we help them get back to business?” he asked. Possible interventions could be in one or all of four areas: capacity building; providing working capital at affordable rates; value-added services such as accounting solutions or simplifying cross-border payments; and improving connectivity at affordable rates.
The third phase is reimagining. “We’ve seen areas such as e-commerce really accelerate in the last nine months. Somewhere like Kenya, where we expected to be in 2025, has happened now.” It is time to rethink how to enable businesses to operate in the new dispensation post-Covid-19.
As an example, he listed the number of M-Pesa merchants at 157,000 in March 2020. By September of last year, this had already grown to 170,000. “I think this shift is permanent towards the digital channels,” said Lopokoiyit.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
Fast rising food ordering and restaurant and restaurant aggregator platform Koinz has raised a US$4.8 million seed funding round to grow its team and expand across the Middle East region. A brainchild of three friends, Hussein Momtaz, Ahmed Said and Abdullah Al Khalidi, Koinz was founded in 2018 by Koinz to help restaurants make smarter business decisions and increase revenue using a data-driven approach. The platform allows restaurants to collect and track real-time data on customer behaviour, improve customer satisfaction and leverage a digital rewarding system.
Hussein Momtaz, Ahmed Said and Abdullah Al Khalidi, Koinz co-founders
Koinz has now secured a US$4.8 million seed round, which is led by Tinder founder Justin Mateen and also features 4DX Ventures and strategic angel investors from Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Already active in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Koinz will use the funds to grow its team and fuel further expansion across the Middle East.
“Restaurants in the region are suffering under the traditional aggregator model, especially during the pandemic. Koinz is offering a unique tech platform that goes beyond an aggregator tool and has quickly become a win-win for both consumers and restaurant owners across the Middle East,” said 4DX managing partner Peter Orth.
“Restaurants can now for the first time ever “see” all of their interactions with consumers across both offline and online touchpoints, which is a huge benefit during the pandemic when in-person visits were limited and therefore customer acquisition would have typically been lost. I think Hussein and his team have the ability to reshape the future of the region’s on-demand food and beverage industry in the coming years.”
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
In a move many claim is suggestive of the general acceptance of Bitcoin as mode of transaction, the Atlanta-based Bitcoin Depot is launching more than 100 new bitcoin (BTC, +4.22%) ATMs in the U.S saying that it has doubled the number of its crypto kiosks in the last six months.
In a press release Wednesday, the company said it is launching 115 kiosks across 24 U.S. states including 14 in Alabama, 13 in Minnesota, 12 in Florida and 12 in California in coming weeks.
Bitcoin ATMs
Bitcoin Depot said it has doubled its number of crypto ATMs in the last six months and now has 2,000 ATMs globally. Users can buy bitcoin, litecoin (LTC, +1.14%) and ethereum (ETH, +1.53%) via the firm’s kiosks.
“Cryptocurrency offers a lot of opportunities for people [who] don’t have access to traditional financial services, like banks,” said the fim’s president and CEO, Brandon Mintz.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
Last week, a $170 million venture investment in Lagos-based Flutterwave, a payments processing startup, set the Nigerian tech ecosystem alight with excitement and pride. That’s because it is one of the few homegrown startups, with local founders and many early local investors, to earn the coveted unicorn status — a startup with a pre-exit valuation at over $1 billion.
It marks another significant validation of Africa’s budding fintech sector. On paper, five-year-old Flutterwave is already more valuable than all but a couple of Nigeria’s biggest banks.
In 2019, Nigerian startups were backed by more than $600 million in venture capital funding. Africa, as a whole, received an inflow of over $1 billion in the same year, the first time the continent’s startups crossed the threshold.
But early on, it was never clear how investors would recoup their investment in these startups or exit their positions. Options for initial public offerings are limited, given the shallow capital markets in most African cities. For instance, Jumia, the e-commerce company serving 11 African countries, chose the New York Stock Exchange for its billion-dollar listing in 2019. But it is often cited as being a rare successful African startup IPO exit.
After almost a decade of investment and growth, insiders in the Nigerian tech — and African — startup community have often wondered privately, and in public, where the next significant exit would come from.
Osita Nwoye, an advisor to early stage startups, told Rest of World that an exit from a startup built by Africans to solve African problems would be a “validation” of the work being done by local founders on the continent’s tech sector over the last decade.
So when news broke last October that U.S. payments giant Stripe would acquire Paystack, a Nigerian payments processor, for more than $200 million, the local ecosystem heartily celebrated one of their own. Founded in 2015 by Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi, Paystack is based primarily in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, and serves about 60,000 customers. This was good news for different players within African tech on a “seismic” level, Nwoye said.
“For the first time at scale, it [Paystack] answered the question ‘where are the exits?’” said, Nwoye, who has advised several startups, including Paystack; he held “tiny” shares in the company for his work as an early advisor.
For local tech venture capitalists and investors, the acquisition provided an opportunity for them to show individuals reluctant to invest in technology that they could get handsome rewards if they bet on the nascent tech scene. And for the employees, it “provided validity of tech as a career,” in a country where oil companies are often seen as the gold standard.
Perhaps less measurable but of no less importance is that Paystack’s purchase is being seen as an inspiration, indicating that Africans, too, can build world-class companies worthy of attracting global interest.
“We believe that Paystack’s story is proof that young people in Africa can solve the hard problems that face the continent, and we hope that it paves the way for more investment and support that will help them build their dreams,” Paystack’s head of growth, Emmanuel Quartey, wrote in an email to Rest of World.
Paystack and Stripe are both alumni of Y Combinator, the prestigious startup accelerator, and the relationship between the companies began when Paystack was introduced to Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, who offered to invest, according to Quartey. That offer resulted in Stripe, alongside Visa and Tencent, investing in Paystack’s $8 million series A round in 2018. The American company’s decision to buy the Nigerian startup was an easy fit in the end.
Stripe’s purchase of Paystack capped off a year of big-ticket acquisitions in African technology. MFS Africa, an African payments gateway, set the ball rolling in June, when it bought Beyonic, a digital payments provider in Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, and Rwanda, for an undisclosed fee.
In August, WorldRemit, the London-based remittances company, reportedly paid $500 million to acquire Sendwave, a Kenya-based remittance company that allows people in Europe and North America to send money to seven African countries and Bangladesh. This represents the biggest-ever form of investment in an African technology startup.
The energy and excitement around Paystack last October has been sparked again with Flutterwave’s latest round, especially after Olugbenga Agboola revealed the next step might be a NYSE IPO. This would be a major boon for its homegrown founders and investors. And it’s not just Silicon Valley or European funders who are showing interest in Africa’s tech scene; Chinese investors are also making a play for the industry. In 2019, OPay, a fintech company, raised $170 million from Chinese investors.
“Everything depends on payments, and, without payments, there’s no business, and everything falls apart.”
African fintech startups have dominated the significant funding headlines on the continent because they are solving problems with legacy financial infrastructure or the lack thereof that hampers African economies. Nwoye, the startup advisor, says fintech — particularly payments — is taking off in Africa because it is the backbone of every internet business on the continent.
“Without payments, there’s no commerce on the internet,” he says.
“Everything depends on payments, and, without payments, there’s no business, and everything falls apart.”
With the eagerly anticipated exits now a reality, there is a general feeling within the African tech industry that they could herald the beginning of a wave of international mergers and acquisitions involving African companies.
Razaq Ahmed, CEO of Cowrywise, a Lagos-based digital savings platform, thinks African startups have now “matured” and predicts more investment from both local and international players, partly due to low global interest rates and the success stories coming out of Africa.
“An important trend coming out strong from late last year is the increased appetite of local capital to participate in the startup ecosystem, says Ahmed. “That is bringing a new spice to the investment opportunity set.”
Aanu Adeoye is a Rest of World reporting fellow based in Johannesburg.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
The need to expand its expertise into the tech intelligence sector is behind the rebranding and restructuring going on at one of Africa’s leading telecommunications outfit; Liquid Telecoms. The company has over the last two decades established itself as the leading pan-African digital infrastructure provider with an extensive network spanning over 73,000 KM. This new development is a culmination of the company’s extensive business transformation from being a telecommunications and digital services provider to a full one-stop-shop technology group through a group-wide rebrand.
Nic Rudnick, Group Chief Executive Officer, Liquid Intelligent Technologies
Over the last two decades, Liquid has firmly established itself as the leading pan-African digital infrastructure provider with an extensive network spanning over 73,000 KM. This rebrand to Liquid Intelligent Technologies highlights the organization’s expansion of its Cloud business, Cyber Security services, and other technologies added to its existing telecoms and connectivity capability.
This furthers the Group’s aim of accelerating growth by providing tailor-made digital solutions to businesses in the public and private sectors across the continent. This strategic rebrand reflects Liquid’s new digital-first product offerings, enabling employees and customers to interact with each other digitally irrespective of the time or location.
By aggressively expanding into new countries, including Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liquid Intelligent Technologies is bringing its award-winning high-performance network connectivity closer to more people and accelerating the development of the digital workplace. Liquid Intelligent Technologies will expand its Managed Services offerings to drive and ensure successful adoption of tools to re-imagine their customers’ businesses and how they work and connect. Whether they are focused on enabling collaboration or utilizing the most advanced cloud applications.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Liquid Intelligent Technologies is redefining Network, Cloud and Cyber Security offerings through strategic partnerships with leading global players, bringing innovative business applications, intelligent cloud services and world-class security to the African continent. With the future of network security-driven from the cloud, Liquid Intelligent Technologies’ recently launched its Cyber Security business unit, which uniquely delivers security at its core, protecting your business’s data throughout its lifecycle.
According to Nic Rudnick, Group Chief Executive Officer, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, “Our ongoing investment in our networks and data centres across Africa have uniquely positioned us to utilise our infrastructure to accelerate the availability of new intelligent technologies including the high computing power of the Cloud, Artificial Intelligence and Cyber Security to our customers.
We are now excited to be executing our vision of bringing new technological opportunities to the market with a highly differentiated product set supported by our existing infrastructure and digital innovation.”
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
To stem the exodus it witnessed in recent times, leading global messaging app WhatsApp has announced that private and secure one-to-one voice and video calls are now available as its desktop app. The calls are end-to-end encrypted which means that WhatsApp can’t hear or see them, whether you call from your phone or your computer.
whatsapp
“With so many people still apart from their loved ones, and adjusting to new ways of working, we want conversations on WhatsApp to feel as close to in-person as possible, regardless of where you are in the world or the tech you’re using,” says the messaging platform.
“We’re starting with one-to-one calls on the WhatsApp desktop app so we make sure we can give you a reliable and high-quality experience.”
To make desktop calling more useful, WhatsApp has made sure it works seamlessly for both portrait and landscape orientation, appears in a resizable standalone window on your computer screen, and is set to be always on top so you never lose your video chats in a browser tab or stack of open windows. This feature is expected to include group voice and video calls in the future.
In a similar development, WhatsApp has unveiled a new progress animation to show iOS users exactly when a voice note ends. According to WABetaInfo, the UI animation update is available on iOS 13 and newer versions. And in this update, if Read Receipts are disabled (WhatsApp Settings > Account > Privacy) the recipient won’t be notified when voice messages are played.
“We don’t know if WhatsApp will restore the old behaviour in the next updates (because they didn’t implement this change in the Android version yet), but at the moment the situation is so.”
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
2020 can only be described as an unpredictable year, and one that brought with it some of the most dramatic shifts we’ve seen in the way we live and work. In a year of uncertainty, it’s safe to say that technology was the one constant – the platform that transformed the fundamentals of commerce, healthcare, education and financial services across the world.
Mohammed Amin, SVP at Dell Technologies MERAT
Disruption is a process that plays out over time; sometimes slowly, but completely and the pandemic proved this to be true. It showed that it’s imperative for organisations to invest in a holistic and strategic approach to respond to the pace of disruption. This investment calls for the convergence of technologies, to connect, collaborate and create new services that will ultimately help weather disruption.
As we head into 2021, the MERAT region is centred around one common theme – how to transform for the long term?
Hybrid cloud for the hybrid workforce: A recent IDC survey showed that across the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa region, at least one-third of CIOs are planning to increase their spending on cloud. Investments in cloud operating models that span public, private and edge environments will continue to grow, enabling rapid scale and management of IT everywhere, with the security and visibility organisations need to keep their data protected.
Edge opportunity comes into focus: The increase in remote work and learning combined with data-powered smart applications has meant that data workloads need to be managed and analysed in real-time at the edge. Across every industry, organisations are now looking to edge technology to improve agility and customer experiences. According to IDC, the worldwide edge computing market will reach $250.6 billion in 2024 with a compound annual growth rate of 12.5% over the 2019–2024 forecast period. This means we’ll see even more investments into simpler and faster to deploy distributed technology infrastructure, particularly within the education and healthcare sectors.
The promise of 5G: The pandemic may have slowed the deployment of 5G networks in non-GCC markets, however, 5G leaders in the GCC have continued to invest in the technology, and 5G activities in non-GCC countries are expected to gather pace again from 2021 according to the GSMA. Effective management of spectrum is key to maximising this opportunity, and mobile network operators will invest in modern IT that “cloudifies” their network architecture – bringing us closer to widespread connectivity and edge processing made possible by 5G.
Intelligent PCs will make work and play more seamless, intelligent and enjoyable: A Forrester Consulting survey revealed that remote work is likely to become the norm, with 67% of decision-makers extending remote working arrangements for some employees even after the pandemic, and 57% introducing more flexible work-from-home policies. As people adapt to hybrid remote working models, technology will continue to evolve as well. We’ll see a combination of AI, cloud and improved connectivity merge to improve user experiences with devices. AI will make PCs more seamless, customised and hassle-free. Intelligent software will help your device understand when you do not want to be seen in a video conference and new apps and services will continue to make collaboration easier and more organic, and the systems we’re using will also start to see upgrades in functionality.
AI disruption will unlock human potential: Technology will enable a greater sense of connectivity in a time where we’re working and learning further apart from our homes. AI and automation will reimagine the division of labour between humans and machines. In this region, AI, IOT and other new interfaces are already changing how organisations and governments operate, with the annual growth in the contribution of AI expected to range between 20-34% per year across the region according to PWC, with the fastest growth in the UAE followed by KSA. AI is also expected to contribute over US$135.2 billion in 2030 to the KSA economy alone. We’ll offload more thinking tasks to AI instead of just mechanical ones, leading to faster, deeper and more meaningful insights than enables us to shift our focus to greater innovation, purposeful work and human connections.
Mohammed Amin, SVP at Dell Technologies MERAT
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
Stitch, the South African-based fintech API startup has said that it successfully raised a $4 million seed round with an impressive global investor line-up as it plans expansion into other regions of the continent. Stitch API which allows developers to connect apps to financial accounts within minutes, allowing their users to share their transaction histories and balances, confirm their identities, and initiate payments has made inroads in South Africa and presently nurse plans for continental expansion.
Kiaan Pillay, Stitch co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO)
Stitch says its tool gives organizations the edge to innovate with new and improved services including personal finance, lending, insurance, payments and wealth management. Stitch also enables fintechs to work with traditional financial institutions in a safer and more compliant way. The startup has now raised a US$4 million seed round, which it claims is the largest investment to date in a pure-play African fintech infrastructure company, and one of the largest seed-stage fintech payments raises the continent has seen.
The startup attracted a stellar group of investors to its seed round, which was co-led by firstminute capital and The Raba Partnership, and also includes CRE, Village Global, Klarna founder Niklas Adalberth through his fund Norrsken, Venmo founder Iqram Magdon Ismail, founding team members at Plaid, and executives at Coinbase, Revolut and Fast. The investor cohort also includes African fintech leaders from Flutterwave – founder Iyinoluwa Aboyeji through his fund Future Africa – and Paystack. Village Global brings backing from LPs such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt and Jeff Bezos.
Stitch will use the funding to build the team, consolidate growth in South Africa, and launch operations in West and East Africa, equipping Africa’s rising fintech community with the tools to build better products faster.
“It makes no sense that we’re still building financial services the same way we did 15 years ago,” said Kiaan Pillay, Stitch co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO).
“There’s an incredible opportunity to provide a new generation of financial services in South Africa and across other African markets. At Stitch, we enable smart people in the ecosystem to unlock this potential and build amazing products and services, powered by our infrastructure.”
Venmo founder and Stitch shareholder Iqram Magdon Ismail said companies that drastically advance the infrastructure of basic needs are very important.
“Stitch is building the solution that will unlock value for all banks and financial institutions in Africa,” he said.
Brent Hoberman, co-founder and general partner of firstminute capital, said Africa has the fastest growing developer community globally.
“Stitch has the opportunity to become the core infrastructure enabling digitisation in the financial services industry across the continent. Every online business in Africa can now easily embed fintech capabilities in their applications – facilitating online payments, increasing lending capacity and streamlining KYC and identity checks – through the Stitch API,” he said.
“As a fellow South African, I’m excited to be partnering with a team of exceptionally talented local engineers with pan-African ambitions.”
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
