[Africa Tech Review] Duncan Mochama: Africa is banking on digital payments innovation to create digital economies.
Every single day, hundreds of millions of payment transactions are completed across Africa via cards, mobile money, and digital payments. The continent is banking on digital payments innovation to create digital economies.
This week, Kenyan-based payments firm Cellulant rolled out a new digital payment platform for SMEs and large businesses in Nigeria. This came just a few days after the firm hired Akshay Grover as the Acting-CEO effective May. Aksha took over from Ken Njoroge, the co-founder and CEO transitioned from his position to take up new roles at the firm’s board level. At the same time, Nigeria’s retail Bank Polaris also launched a digital bank called VULTe for its customers. In Kenya, Safaricom announced that it’s in talks with U.S e-commerce giant Amazon to integrate M-PESA as a payment option. With this partnership shoppers in Kenya will be able to pay for goods on Amazon using M-PESA. The move is also expected to help Safaricom increase its M-PESA revenues which declined by 2.1 percent to Ksh.82. 64 billion in the financial year ending March 2021.
This week, Mondia, a private m-commerce company dedicated to connecting, digitizing and monetizing mobile consumers, announced the launch of Getmo Games, a new gaming service for MTN Nigeria subscribers.CSG announced a multi-year extension to its long-standing relationship with MTN South Africa, the largest mobile network operator in Africa. As part of this new agreement, CSG is advancing and enhancing MTN’s digital ecosystem including migrating MTN’s enterprise and consumer customers to a new end-state systems architecture. Still on matters telcos, GSMA this week called on governments to license 6 GHZ to power 5G saying The global future of 5G is at risk if governments fail to align on licensing 6 GHz spectrum. Viasat Inc., a global communications company, was also granted a full suite of operating licenses.
African startups were also in the news this week. Kenya-based e-commerce startup BeautyClick announced its exclusive distribution partnership with Italian cosmetic brand NOUBA. After its launch in September last year, venture builder Satgana also announced its first portfolio startup from Nairobi, Kenya. Still in Kenya, the Standard Chartered Bank awarded 5 women-led businesses with KES 1,000,000 each. The businesses were picked from the 4th cohort of the Standard Chartered Bank Women in Tech incubation program. Norwegian-based accelerator Pangea unveiled a scale-up program offering private funding of up to Ksh 300 million and business support to enable locally funded startups to accelerate their enterprises to the next level.
South African fintech startup Ukheshe Technologies also announced that it will be expanding its footprint into the Asia-Pacific region as it introduces innovative digital-first payment solutions. AlphaCode also announced the four South African fintech startups that will be part of the second phase of the AlphaCode Incubate programme.
In Ghana, ROYBI INC, the creator of ROYBI Robot for children, entered into a collaboration agreement with LING Project to provide its educational robot and other resources to selected schools in Ghana.
Other highlights of the week include Aero Africa launching airfreight digital platform targeting African logistics industry and Asian e- commerce company QNET to launch operations in Kenya.
Duncan Mochama is the solutions consultant at Incentro Africa.