The year is 2010, a young Eric Osiakwan is engaged in two experiments; getting the West Africa Backhaul Company (WABco) off the ground as an entrepreneur during the day and backing early-stage tech startups by night. Over the next three years, the former faces major headwinds whilst the latter takes off, and with it his …
Celebrations are in order because Nigeria turned 61 on 1st October 2021. In the “KINGS of Africa’s Digital Economy”, I recognized Nigerians for their hustle and that hustle has to date produced four of the leading fintech unicorns in Africa namely, INTERSWITCH, FLUTTERWAVE, CHIPPER CASH and OPAY. You can make that five if you count …
The Fintech Unicorns of The Federal Republic of Nigeria Read More »
Nairobi is the leading Fintech ecosystem city in Africa according to the 2021 Global Fintech Rankings published on 8th July 2021 in which it jumped 26 places to the 37th position globally beating both Lagos and Accra. Kenya’s President, His Excellency Uhuru Kenyatta stated at a UK summit that “Nairobi International Financial Centre (NIFC) has …
Three leading Ghanaian fintechs; Hubtel, ExpressPay and IT Consortium joined forces to build Ghana government’s portal https://www.ghana.gov.gh – a digital services and payment platform for Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs), Startups and citizens to access government services at the click of a button. Despite being competitors, these tech ventures saw the need to collaborate as a …
Fintechs, SMEs and Digitization in Africa – Ghana leads the charge Read More »
Africa’s leading Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), MTN, Vodacom and Safaricom, have recently made bold plans to venture into the increasingly dynamic world of fintech. On 23rd June 2021, Safaricom launched its super app, which creates an ecosystem of mini apps from the network operator as well as third party apps that feed off the super …
I ended my May 2021 essay with the hypothesis “…leading fintechs might turn around and start acquiring the banks” and, sure enough, on the 12th of May 2021, the Competition Authority of Kenya in a gazette notice approved the acquisition of 84.89% stake in Century Microfinance Bank by Branch International Limited – a leading global …
The first quarter of 2021 ended on a great note as two African fintech businesses gained unicorn status, a rare fit amidst a raging global pandemic which is finally being aggressively tackled by the speedy supply of much-needed vaccines. Such is the African story – a trail of surprises in the midst of uncertainty. On …
Three significant news items went on the global wire on 25th February 2021 as follows; 1. Liquid Telecom, a member of the Econet Group that has laid more than 70,000km of fiber optic cable across Africa, raised $840M financing package (US$620M bond and a US$220M equivalent term loan in Rand). This was Liquid Telecom’s second …
African Corporate Executives turn to Tech Entrepreneurship: Part 2 Read More »
President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel once said “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste. It provides the opportunity to do things that were not possible to do before”. When the COVID-19 crisis hit the global north the fear was that it would be most devastating in Africa with Bill Gates …
