Nabilah Safira
TechInAfrica – Rand Merchant Investment Holding (RMI) has awarded entrepreneurial packaged worth of R16 million to 8 of South Africa’s most promising financial services startups, through AlphaCode. Each startup will receive a package that’s worth around R2 million, including R1 million in grant funding and R1 million in support services. All the startups have been running for less than two years and 51% of them are owned by the black community of South Africans.
Included in the package are mentorship program, monthly expert-led sessions, exclusive office space in Sandton marketing, business support services such as the legal ones and others, and also access to like-minded entrepreneurs, RMI’s an extensive network of thought leaders, potential clients, as well as the capital.
The AlphaCode Incubate initiative, in partnership with Merrill Lynch South Africa and Royal Bafokeng Holdings, identifies South African financial services entrepreneurs with ‘extraordinary ideas’ and businesses that could impact the financial services industry.
The Incubate program has disbursed R21 million in funding to 23 black-owned financial services businesses since it began 4 years ago. “We have seen a notable improvement in the quality of applications year on year. This is indicative that AlphaCode is making an impact in the maturing of the fintech ecosystem,” said Dominique Collett, head of AlphaCode.
According to Collett, Alphacode’s Explore, Incubate and Accelerate programs aim to let RMI discovering the next OUTsurance or Discovery, as they would like to be able to identify, partner while growing the future of financial services in South Africa. He also noted that 2 of the participants originated from their Explore program.
More than 200 startups participated with 12 participants made it to the final pitch and 8 recipients were selected.
The event proceeds as follow, contestants are given 3 minutes to pitch their businesses, and other minutes saved for the top panel of judges fronted questions to the participants who are, Barry Swartzberg, the co-founder of Discovery and Vitality’s CEO; Danie Mathee, CEO of OUTsurance; Mary Vilakazi, COO of Firstrand, Katlego Kobue, iKatlego has an account investment manager at Royal Bakofeng Holdings; Raymond Ndlovu, Investments Executive at Remgro and Dominique Collett.
These were the 8 businesses that received the packages:
Mari: This layby platform allows digital payments to be made and for savings. Customers would be able to make a layby purchase without incurring the traveling cost from and to the store for payments and create personal credit scores through an existing payment structure without a bank account.
Spoon Money: A platform intended for female informal traders on micro-working capital finance with group-based focus, to cover the impracticalities of having no access to credit, thus limiting support of their businesses, and enhance their opportunity to create a sustainable and stable income instead.
IsiDuli: This credit product focus on handling the backyard rental stock development on townships, since there is a lack of accesses to the finance development for owners of properties and very little affordable rental stock for consumers.
Oyi Medical Card: It is a prepaid card solution for helping people who have trouble affording their medical care. The majority of South Africans couldn’t afford medical-aid and don’t always ready-to-pay cash for unexpected medical expenses. While it’s a prepaid card, the feature of this integrated payment technology is only restricted for medical uses only.
Budgie: Budgie was born to change the way people are living their lives by warranting better financial habits. Free and interactive, this platform will facilitate and assist user’s spending based on the designed budget by the user and through this platform, it is expected to solve the conundrum of financial stress while boosting the freedom and control of the user’s financial situation.
okGo.live: A platform that gives access to people who are locked out of the market by reducing accident repair costs by +50%, reducing fraud claims by 75% and making customers self-service to lower premiums, while providing added value to customers through vehicle data analytics to prevent mechanical failures, and more. On-demand vehicle insurance that is specifically targeted at out of warranty vehicle owners is the background of this platform’s creation.
Olova: Olova aims to fix the lack of integration and interoperability between public transport systems by offering a single payment option for the public transport systems.
GetVanced: Millions of low-income workers live from one day pay to the next, and are financially stressed, with the most pressing everyday issue for South Africans is managing the cash flow, and the most crucial issue is the timing mismatches of income and expenses due to the lack of savings buffer. GetVanced as an income advancing platform based on the employee’s earned income, aim to solve the issue of the income timing by paying out employee advances based on the income they earned to date.
Source: businesstech.co.za
