Innovators in the financial technology sector alias FinTechs have been advised by the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) governor Patrick Njoroge and cautioned against rushing to launch products without proper testing and verification. The financial services sector chief regulator insisted on taking time to develop with special focus on addressing particular problems amongst consumers. Dr. Njoroge was speaking during a two-day Afro-Asia FinTech festival that recently concluded.
The first of its kind, the Afro-Asia forum brought together an estimated 1500 delegates comprising of regulators, innovators, financiers and academicians. Referring to the success of M-Pesa, the mobile money platform run by Vodafone’s local run enterprise as Safaricom Ltd that has boosted Kenya’s global reputation in FinTech, he urged patience among developers.
The country has more than 100 FinTech products, with an estimated cumulative investment of $1 billion by the year 2020, revealed Safaricom’s financial services chief officer Sitoyo Lopokoiyit. The telecommunication giant has powered some of the country’s successful FinTech innovations such as M-Tiba mobile healthcare wallet and Digifarm, an agribusiness platform.
Mr. Lopokoiyit reported that M-Tiba has attracted more than $2 million in investments with consumers able to contribute as little as Shs. 10 towards their healthcare and medical services. Digifarm, boasting about 1 million subscribers, enables smallholder farmers to access information on the mobile devices, aiming to help them enhance farm yields as well as access credit, farm inputs and connect to potential markets.
Daraja, an Application Programming Interface (API) launched by Safaricom two years back has helped developers to quickly and efficiently integrate with M-Pesa payment platform that SME’s highly depend on. Stawi, a CBK backed mobile loan product for SME’s offered through multiple top banks in Kenya is one of the latest FinTech products to tap into the M-Pesa platform.
Kenya has been a major destination of funds invested into FinTechs in African alongside South Africa and Nigeria. A GSMA mobile economy report recently revealed that Kenyan mobile startups raised $147 million in 27 deals back in 2017, majority of which were invested in FinTechs. To facilitate development of “quality” FinTechs which solve “consumer problems”, the CBK penned a Memorandum of Understanding with its Singapore counterpart, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to help in licensing of FinTechs run by local banks.
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