The Pan African Bank, Ecobank Transnational International Group has announced that it will offer $10,000 for winners of its upcoming Ecobank Fintech Challenge. The Challenge which opened in February for applications to African fintechs, will award $10 000 to a fintech for a winning solution that can assist the bank, while the first runner-up will get $7000 and the second runner-up $5000 in cash prizes. The challenge aims to help support fintechs that are ready to scale and provides them with support and access to Ecobank’s 33 African markets so they can grow to become pan-African fintech success stories.

The Ecobank Fintech Challenge offers fintechs the opportunity to integrate with the bank’s offerings and also also offers fintechs the opportunity to potentially integrate with Ecobank’s existing digital offerings. Applications for the Challenge closes on on 12 April 2020 as interested fintechs should submit details of their product as well as a demo to the challenge. These products must address one or more of a specific set of pain points, namely: Customer experience: Ecobank is looking for products that offer solutions and innovations in the following areas: digital customer onboarding, those that improve customer experience at branches, those that improve customer experience online, digitisation of the customer journey.

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To win the Challenge, the Bank is looking for innovative solutions that help improve lending to SMEs. It is also looking for ecosystem aggregation which gives the Bank the opportunity to work with innovators offering solutions on SME/Merchants onboarding on payment integration, niche merchant aggregation and those solutions that provide easy access to non-smart phone users. Equally high on the Bank’s radar are digital solutions that help improve performance of sales force as well as solutions that enable agents to offer more services, and fintechs to help solve problems around offline mobile-to-mobile payments (dead zones).

In addition, the bank is willing to consider any other solution that fintechs believe will help revolutionise the banking sector in Africa. Finalists will be selected to participate in the Ecobank Fintech Innovation Fair, while all finalists will be inducted into the Ecobank Fintech Fellowship, which will provide fellows an opportunity to explore deals, integration and commercial partnership with the Ecobank Group.

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