Grace Ashiru
The eighth Africa Fintech Summit, held in Cape Town, South Africa, from November 2–4, 2022, will bring together fintech stakeholders worldwide. The venue for the conference is the Cape Town International Convention Centre. It is thought to be the leading fintech event in Africa.
Through plenary sessions, networking opportunities, keynote talks, startup demos and exhibitions, an ecosystem tour, and the 2022 AlphaExpo Micro Accelerator Pitch Competition, the Cape Town edition this November aims to bring robustly and carefully designed community-oriented activities.
The Africa Fintech Summit has been held seven times over the past five years. It is an initiative to build a fintech ecosystem by bringing the world’s attention to Africa’s rapidly growing fintech sector, fostering intra-African and continental partnerships, and giving innovative and effective financial services solutions a place to get started.
The Africa Fintech Summit was voted the most interesting World Bank Spring Series event. It is held twice a year, once in April during the World Bank Group spring meetings in Washington, D.C., and once in November in a different African city. The most recent ones were held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Lagos, Nigeria, and Cairo, Egypt.
Over 100 high-impact plenary, closed-door, and networking sessions have taken place at the summits, with more than 4,000 people attending in person or online and more than 200 panelists representing more than $4.5 billion in private equity and venture capital funding.
From making it easier to make policies to letting people share their knowledge and start strategic partnerships, the Africa Fintech Summit has always helped people think of ways to make Africa financially stable and open to everyone.
Through the Alpha Expo Micro Accelerator, startups have also found that the summit is the perfect way to get their projects off the ground. Companies like Yellow Card, Market Force, PiggyVest, PayHippo, Asaak, and others that went through the program have raised more than $200 million.
The Africa Fintech Summit in Cape Town comes after a successful 7th summit last spring, which was held in Washington, D.C., during the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings and brought together over 450 fintech stakeholders in person and online.
The Cape Town summit will try to build on the success of past events and continue the conversations about building an ecosystem that began in April in Washington, D.C., under the theme “Africanization of global fintech.”
At the summit, people will talk about fintech policy and regulation, cross-border payments and remittance, local tech talent, mobile money and interoperability, blockchain and cryptocurrency use cases, corporate venture capital, intra-African trade, and more.
Over 60 of the best fintech innovators, finance executives, investors, policymakers, and government officials are expected to lead these conversations.
Panelists may include Tosin Eniolorunda of TeamApt, Shola Akinlade of Paystack, Wiza Jalakasi of Chipper Cash, Omosalewa Adeyemi of Flutterwave, Djiba Diallo of Ecobank, Perez Lavina Ramkissoon of the Fintech Association of South Africa and Miranda Perumal of Visa,
In addition to the panel discussions and workshops, delegates can sign up for a Cape Town Ecosystem Tour on November 4. This tour will show delegates the thriving fintech and startup ecosystems in South Africa. According to a report by Disrupt Africa, 30% (147) of the 490 active tech startups in South Africa are in fintech. This is almost three times more than e-commerce and retail tech, which is the next biggest group (50 startups).
South Africa has also consistently gotten the most funding out of all the countries in Southern Africa. Since 2019, it has raised about $1.7B, which is more than 95% of all the funding startups in the region have gotten.
Nomaindia Mfeketo, South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, talked about the summit coming to his country. He said, “The Africa Fintech Summit is a great idea because it focuses on financial inclusion and gives underserved and unbanked people access to financial services that are cheap and easy to use through innovative technology.” I’d like to welcome the members of AFTS from all over the world to beautiful South Africa, where they can enjoy wonderful conference tourism.
We are delighted to bring AFTS to South Africa, which is a world leader in banking and telecom services and one of the top African countries with the most advanced technological ecosystem hubs and skilled tech talent, said Zekarias Amsalu Dubale, co-founder of AFTS and founder and managing director of Ibex Frontier.
We’re looking forward to having our global delegates and ecosystem players come to Cape Town in November so that partnerships and projects can be made to bring more tech from Africa to the world.
