Browsing: Africa Fintech

Over a couple of decades, cash and mobile app money transactions such as M-Pesa have dominated the financial space, but with its growth, there is a new collaboration with Fintechs set in place to capture the price-sensitive market with improved innovation and open-loop digital solutions in East Africa.

Financial technology (Fintech) is used to describe new technology that seeks to improve and automate the delivery and use of financial services. ​​​At its core, fintech is utilized to help companies, business owners, and consumers to better manage their financial operations, processes, and lives by utilizing specialized software and algorithms that are used on computers and, increasingly, smartphones.

The International President of Ukheshe Technologies Mark Dankworth, firmly believes that the region is poised for a surge in digital banking growth, with the likes of MCQR and virtual cards likely to make the biggest impact.

This follows the Kenyan retail-tech startup, Tanda which …

In mid-January, US based financial whistleblower and research organization Hindenburg Research released a report titled’ The Phantom of the turn-around’ in which it questioned the operations of Opera, the Chinese owned browser whose popularity in Africa has remained high. What has followed is a series of class-action lawsuits by a dozen law firms in US and UK against the browser.

The research firm accused Opera of “developing predatory short-term loans in Africa and India, deploying deceptive ‘bait and switch’ tactics to lure in borrowers and charging egregious interest rates ranging from 365-876%.” This, the company says is going against Google policies of charging fair rates on short term loans.

According to financial firm Hindenburg Research, Opera has launched at least four payment apps under various developer accounts. There’s Okash and OPesa in Kenya, CashBean in India, and OPay in Nigeria.

It noted that Opera has scaled its “Fintech” segment from …