Exploring Africa’s blossoming fintech ecosystem, The Fintech Instances delves into the success of Visa’s Accelerator Program from the cohort’s perspective, uncovering this system’s instrumental function in fostering and bolstering startups throughout the continent.
With the fintech startup scene rising at an exponential fee, the Visa Africa Fintech Accelerator goals to assist these startups throughout the continent in a 12-week digital program to assist them of their subsequent stage of progress.
The inaugural version of the accelerator showcased 23 startups hailing from throughout Africa. Every participant benefited from tailor-made mentoring periods carried out by trade professionals and gained entry to invaluable insights from varied stakeholders throughout the ecosystem, together with Visa companion Plug and Play.
Amin Ben Abderrahman, CEO of Konnect, a Tunisian fintech that helps companies of all sizes scale and develop utilizing totally different fee strategies, sat down with Polly Jean Harrison from The Fintech Instances to share extra about their journey with the Visa Fintech Accelerator program.
The present panorama
In line with Abderrahman, the African market is continually transferring, with fintech typically seeing the most important funding because it strikes ahead.
It’s this motion that Abderrahman believes makes Visa inquisitive about nurturing the African market as “there may be nonetheless so much to do.”
He continued: “For instance, within the nation the place we’re working, we have now solely 35 per cent of the inhabitants that’s banked – from that 35 per cent, solely 30 per cent have a fee card – so the market remains to be enormous.”
“I feel Visa is seeing it as an excellent signal for them to spend money on supporting these small fintech firms of their mission of creating digital monetary companies extra frequent, inexpensive, and accessible. So, this accelerator program has come on time.”
Help from specialists
As a part of their participation in this system, every startup acquired assist and steering from a wide range of trade gamers.
“Now we have been put in contact with a variety of specialists coming from Visa’s community and Plug and Play’s community,” defined Abderrahman.
“Now we have had a number of workshops about regulation, compliance, enterprise fashions, advertising and so forth. It was nice to listen to all these specialists giving us concepts, it’s enlightening in so some ways. We additionally had privileged entry to Visa APIs to discover a bit extra with what we will do with {the catalogue} of APIs and companies that Visa is providing. We are able to open the eyes of the banks and different folks from the ecosystem to the capabilities that we have now immediately in our mission to make monetary companies extra accessible to everybody.”
To be taught extra about Konnect, its place within the African market and involvement within the Visa Fintech Accelerator, watch the full video interview under.
