Afridigest Fintech Review: Africa's newest telco-led super app
Week 47 2023: Nov 19-25
Afridigest is your intelligent guide to Africa’s tech ecosystem. The Fintech Review is a weekly recap of what matters in African fintech.
On to the week’s fintech highlights:
• $10 million was raised in announced African fintech transactions this week.
• News of the week: French telco Orange joined Africa’s super app race. M-KOPA finally expanded to South Africa — first up: Soweto. And a global survey found that men are consistently more likely to use fintech products than women.
• Companies appearing in today’s Fintech Review: FrontEdge, ClickPesa, Brolly, KashNow, Mastercard, Bloc, Klasha, M-KOPA, Stitch, Orange, and others.
• Executives appearing: Klasha’s Jess Anuna, Fawry’s Ashraf Sabry, TAP’s Michael Oluwole, Qore’s Mudiaga Umukoro, EBANX’s Wiza Jalakasi, Paymentology’s Kirsten Wortmann, Nclude’s Basil Moftah, AV8 Ventures’s Amir Kabir, Nelson Nelson-Atuonwu, and more.
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With that said, let’s get into it!
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Week 47 2023: Nov 19-25
$10M in funding to African fintechs was announced this week.
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📰 Thoughts of the WeekSuper apps are on the rise across Africa.
That’s something I wrote about a couple of years ago in ‘How Africa’s super app landscape is evolving.’
In that article, I called out telco-driven super apps as one of the main categories of super apps in Africa. And I posited that French telco Orange’s mobile banking app Orange Bank Africa “could eventually morph into a super app of sorts.”
Well, this week Orange officially joined Africa’s super app race.
It launched the application ‘Max it’ in Cameroon, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Botswana — and it will soon make the app available in the 12 other countries where Orange is present across the MEA region.
Here’s a quick look at telco-led super apps in Africa:
Fingers crossed, I’ll publish an article focused on telco-led super apps in Africa soon 🤞🏽
PRODUCT LAUNCHES
South African payments infrastructure provider Stitch launched its ‘Pay with crypto’ offering that allows businesses to accept crypto payments and get settled in fiat.
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🙈 Visual of the week
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