Barclays Africa Group, hosted the ‘Barclays Accelerator External Demo Day’, on the 2nd of August at the White Space building in Cape Town. Ten fintech companies pitched their tech-based solutions live on stage to the audience, giving them the chance to hear directly from the most ground breaking pioneers in the fintech space.
These top innovative companies include; Abe.ai from the US, Kapitalwise from the US, as well as FOMO Group and Byte Money from South Africa to test the potential to scale up and roll out the solutions across the ten countries where Barclays Africa Group has operations. Others include Howler, FlexPay, Spatialedge, Sun Exchange and Avenews-GT.
“Any of these solutions could have the potential to solve some of the biggest challenges facing the financial services sector in Africa,” said Hadjibashi, who leads Barclay Africa Group’s innovation agenda.
The fintech companies are among businesses that participated in the 2017 Barclays Accelerator, powered by Techstars, a worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed.
The participating companies were selected in a competitive process that attracted applications from more than 50 countries.
The demo day was presented to an audience of investors and corporate partners, where they got to showcase both the breadth and depth of their innovative business taking off here in Africa.
“I’m excited by the calibre and potential that these companies have to offer,” said Yossi Hasson, Managing Director of Techstars (Barclays Accelerator).
The money related administrations industry has encountered critical interruption in the course of recent years as nimble fintech new businesses presented solutions that conveyed step-changes to client comfort and effectiveness.
Barclays Africa Group is remaining on top of things by grasping these new companies and their dexterous approach and going beyond the normal standard.
“Innovation is the powerful collaboration of bright humble minds that are continuously originating, testing and shipping new customer-centric products,” said Hadjibashi.
More about the participants in the 2017 Barclays Accelerator:
Abe.ai is an AI platform that eliminates friction within customer interactions, helping banks provide superior customer service at scale while reducing operational costs
Howler is a tech platform that event organisers use to optimise the planning, promotion, management and control of their events, and to create fault-free, seamless guest experience.
Spatialedge is proprietary technology, as well as wholly owned spatial and consumer datasets used to drive precision targeted engagements with existing, and prospective clients, growing both the customer base and customer lifetime value by enabling critical customer acquisition and retention activities to become data driven.
Sun Exchange enables anyone in the world own and lease solar panels to power African businesses and communities to earn a solar powered income. Sun Exchange closes a huge gap for commercial scale solar energy finance across Africa. The underpinning technology that enables this is Blockchain, utilised to enable global micro-investing using autonomous secure smart-contracts.
FOMO Group consists of two subsidiaries; FOMO Travel and FOMO Payments. FOMO Travel is a proven business which allows people to travel debt-free and conscience-free. FOMO Payments is taking the same model to the entire travel industry by allowing a wider scope of travelers to use the gamified, lay-buy, interest-free payment solution with any supplier.
Avenews-GT is a decentralized ecosystem for agricultural trade that provides a digital trading platform based on Blockchain technology to enable verified farmers and cooperatives to transact directly with agri-buyers such as retailers and manufacturers to reduce distribution costs, create financial security and increase supply chain transparency.
Byte Money is a receipting and allocation specialist servicing Sub Saharan Africa. The platform enables secure, verified and authenticated ‘agent collections’ and real time reporting for the micro finance industry.
FlexPay Technologies offer an automated, reliable and accurate lay-buy purchase platform that increases merchant’s sales by enabling customers to afford goods and services via convenient flexible payments. With both online and offline functionality, consumers are enabled to make payments towards the intended item for purchase over a stipulated timeframe.
eCoida is a web based platform, bringing together employers, employees, medical service providers (“MSPs”) and the Insurer, in a real-time, seamless and integrated process that conforms to the full spectrum of statutory and policy requirements in the Injury on duty market space.
Kapitalwise disrupts the way millennial investors invest in capital markets by simplifying the process through the automation of investment decisions. They empower financial enterprises with a simple and easy to use digital platform that will nudge users to make frequent but small investment.
