The Ecobank Fintech Challenge is open to all startups with innovative solutions addressing the needs of the African population and its diaspora.
It has been created with two objectives in mind:
- Identify and support Fintechs that are ready to scale up with resources, funding, partnerships, etc. in Ecobank’s 33 African markets.
- Leverage these pan-African Fintech success stories and the solutions they offer to improve Africa’s financial integration and economic development.
Topics to Consider for Participation
The Challenge is not just any other competition. It encourages participating startups and developers to consider the below pain points and address them through their innovations – eventually leading to a better Africa.
- Customer experience
- Improved customer experience both online and at the branch
- Digital customised solutions using analytics and AI
- Efficient customer support, complaint resolution and personalised self-service
- Defined reporting outcomes to measure value
- Financial inclusion
- Digital customer onboarding (Consumers, SME/Merchant, Investment Banking)
- Increasing the payment wallet size across the network
- Payments
- Offline mobile to mobile payments (Dead Zones)
- Increasing the payment wallet size within the African context
- Ecosystem aggregration
- SME/Merchants onboarding and payment integration
- Niche merchant aggregation through tailored solutions per sector
- Mobile collections that synchronise with the Xpress point system
- Internal tools
- Digital solutions that improve sales force performance
- Credit scoring
- 360° view on customers’ and prospects’ financial activities with other FIs
- Digitisation of the lending journey for SMEs
Here’s what you gain
The Challenge is the ideal launchpad for African Fintech innovators and startups to scale up to the next grand level with full support from Ecobank. It brings together a diverse pool of Africa-focused innovations to solve Africa’s financial inclusion pain points.
- Multinational product rollout
- Commercial partnership and integration opportunities to access and launch products across Ecobank’s 33 African markets
- Service provider partnerships
- Business acceleration and capacity building support along with the opportunity to be a country-level partner in Ecobank’s ecosystem
- Access to the pan-African banking Sandbox
- Support of a dedicated team to carry out Ecobank’s API tests and enable better integration of Fintech products in the pan-African market
- Well-established partner network
- Easy access and relationship building with global and African accelerators, potential investors and mentors because of Ecobank Fintech Fellowship
- Competition cash prizes
- $50,000 no-strings attached cash prize support to the winning company along with more cash prizes to the top three winners
- Integration with the existing digital offerings
- Launchpad to leverage the existing products such as Omni, Electronic Financial Supply Chain (eFSC), Xpress, Mobile App, MasterPass™ QR, mVISA™ & mCash, etc.
Criteria
- All Fintechs with relevant financial products for Africa are eligible to apply to the Ecobank Fintech Challenge.
For more information, visit Ecobank
