Visa will host its Africa Fintech Accelerator program’s inaugural demo day on February 13th in Nairobi. The demo day will showcase innovations from emerging fintech startups from 18 countries across Africa.
The program was launched in June 2023 and it aims to enable Africa’s expanding startup community by bringing expertise, connections, technology, and investment funding.
During the event, the first-cohort start-ups will pitch their innovations to key ecosystem players, funding partners, angel investors, and venture capitalists. The first program participants were selected from more than 1,000 applicants across diverse subsectors including merchant payment solutions, lending infrastructure, Banking-as-a-Service, and B2B marketplaces.
The fintechs participating in the first demo day are Duqha (Kenya), Power (Kenya), Workpay (Kenya), OkHi (Nigeria) and Eversend (Uganda), among others.
Visa has also announced that the program is now accepting applications for its second cohort. Seed to Series A startups operating in Africa and that fall under the following categories are encouraged to apply here visa.com/visa-accelerator, with applications open until February 29th.
1. Unlocking money movement: Digitizing various payment types (P2P, B2C, B2B, G2C) to create new commerce opportunities, including cross-border remittances and funds disbursements, open banking and account-to-account solutions, mobile money flows, and interoperability.
2. Embedded finance: Creating advanced intelligence to enhance payment and finance experiences in B2C and B2B commerce models, including installments, flexible financing, consumer loyalty, and Fintech-as-a-Service.
3. Empowering merchants and SMEs: Accelerating the growth of merchants and SMEs through digital payment solutions to foster financial inclusion, focusing on next-generation omnichannel payments, digital onboarding, working capital optimization, and merchant value-add solutions.
4. Payment infrastructure enablers: Building the base layer of payment infrastructure and key enabling services such as authentication and fraud solutions, digital onboarding and identity management, credit scoring and risk management solutions, and data solutions and insights.
5. The future of finance: Embracing emerging technologies to revolutionize financial services, such as AI-powered payments, blockchain and enterprise DLT, and programmable money.
Sustainable and inclusive finance: Enhancing payments technology to contribute to an eco-friendly economy, drive inclusiveness, reduce inequality, and create positive impact through financial services for underserved communities or climate-vulnerable communities and affordable and accessible financial solutions.