Afridigest Fintech Review: Ghanaian banks losing millions of dollars due to crypto?
Week 2 2023: January 8-14
The Afridigest Fintech Review is a weekly recap of what happened in African fintech.
Hello again, friends! Remember: this Fintech Review goes out on Sundays, and the regular Week in Review goes out on Mondays. (Today’s edition is slightly later than planned — thanks mostly to enjoyable conversations with Dees, Moustapha, & Alioune. 🙏🏽)
On to the week’s highlights:
• Almost $3M raised across five publicly announced deals.
• There’s a new RNPL ‘ride now, pay later offering in Nigeria and some people aren’t too happy about it.
• There’s up to $1.5M in grant funding up for grabs (per project) for projects that boost financial inclusion. Banks, fintechs, and non-bank financial service providers serving Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tanzania, and a few other countries are eligible. (No South Africa, no Kenya though.) The link to this won’t appear in the Monday Week in Review by the way.
• Companies appearing in today’s Fintech Review: Shekel Mobility, Waza, Agro Supply, Assuraf, PaddyCover, Kwara, Flutterwave, Roqqu, Yellow Card, M-PESA, Moniepoint & more.
• Executives appearing: Jem’s Simon Ellis, Kuda’s Bradley Want, Finch Technologies’ Michael Bowren, Yellow Card’s Alice Tomdio, Talk 360’s Dean Hiine, upnup’s Justin Asher, Bitmama’s Grace Akinosun, Kuunda’s Flora Kaheru, EBANX’s Fabio Scopeta, SecondSTAX’s Eugene Tawiah and Duke Lartey (COO), Paym8’s Andrew Springate & more
⭐ Not interested in fintech? No problem: visit the Notifications section of your Account Settings page and deselect the Fintech option. (And if you speak French, make sure to turn notifications on for Afridigest Français — it’ll come back fully from hiatus soon.)
[If you’re not a paying subscriber of Afridigest, you’ll only see a free preview of this Fintech Review. Remember to upgrade your subscription or start a trial to read it in full. Check out previous, non-paywalled versions here, here, and here.]
Week 2 2023: January 8-14
💸 FundraisesAFRICA
🇳🇬 Shekel Mobility, the Nigerian neobank and trading platform for auto dealers whose acceptance into Y Combinator’s W23 batch was featured in Week 52 2022, announced that it raised a $1.95M pre-seed (debt & equity)
🇳🇬 Waza, a Nigerian B2B payments infrastructure provider helping businesses with treasury and liquidity needs, is participating in Y Combinator’s Winter 23 batch ($500K)
Here are the Africa-focused fintechs receiving $100K in equity investments as a part of Catalyst Fund’s new cohort:
🇺🇬 Agro Supply, a Ugandan agrifintech offering a mobile-phone-based, micro-savings layaway system
🇸🇳 Assuraf, a Senegalese digital insurtech platform
🇳🇬 PaddyCover, a Nigerian digital insurance platform
🤝🏻 Mergers & AcquisitionsKenyan neobank for credit unions Kwara is acquiring software company IRNET Coop Kenya for an undisclosed amount. IRNET is a subsidiary of the Kenya Union of Savings and Credit Cooperatives.
Nigerian/pan-African payments unicorn Flutterwave is part of a consortium of fintechs and existing investors looking to acquire British fintech Railsr (formerly Railsbank). Railsr bills itself as ‘the world's leading embedded finance experiences platform’ and counts over 250 B2B customers and 5.5 million accounts.
💡 Executive Insights
🧐 Read the full post on LinkedIn.
🚀 Partnerships & Product LaunchesLAUNCHES & PARTNERSHIPS
Nigerian BNPL platform CredPal announced a partnership with ride-hailing platform Bolt to launch ‘ride now, pay later’ option Ride-On. Here’s how Ibrahim responded:
