Exploring Africa’s blossoming fintech ecosystem, The Fintech Occasions delves into the success of Visa’s Accelerator Program from the cohort’s perspective, uncovering this system’s instrumental position in fostering and bolstering startups throughout the continent.

With the fintech startup scene rising at an exponential charge, 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 classes carried out by trade professionals and gained entry to invaluable insights from varied stakeholders throughout the ecosystem, together with Visa accomplice Plug and Play.

Amin Ben Abderrahman, CEO of Konnect, a Tunisian fintech that helps companies of all sizes scale and develop utilizing completely different fee strategies, sat down with Polly Jean Harrison from The Fintech Occasions to share extra about their journey with the Visa Fintech Accelerator program. 

The present panorama

In keeping with Abderrahman, the African market is consistently shifting, with fintech usually seeing the largest funding because it strikes ahead. 

It’s this motion that Abderrahman believes makes Visa enthusiastic about nurturing the African market as “there may be nonetheless rather a lot 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 large.”

“I believe Visa is seeing it as signal for them to put money into supporting these small fintech firms of their mission of constructing digital monetary providers extra frequent, reasonably priced, and accessible. So, this accelerator program has come on time.”

Help from consultants

As a part of their participation in this system, every startup obtained assist and steerage from quite a lot of trade gamers. 

“We now have been put in contact with quite a lot of consultants coming from Visa’s community and Plug and Play’s community,” defined Abderrahman. 

“We now have had a number of workshops about regulation, compliance, enterprise fashions, advertising and so forth. It was nice to listen to all these consultants giving us concepts, it’s enlightening in so some ways. We additionally had privileged entry to Visa APIs to discover a bit of extra with what we will do with {the catalogue} of APIs and providers that Visa is providing. We will open the eyes of the banks and different individuals from the ecosystem to the capabilities that we have now immediately in our mission to make monetary providers 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.