Africa Fintech Summit has awarded Ecobank Group with “Excellence in Fintech-Banking Relationships” award in recognition of the bank’s activities to support and facilitate fintech growth on the African continent. The award was given at its last meeting in Washington DC, United States of America. Africa Fintech Summit is a global knowledge-sharing platform that connects innovators, regulators and entrepreneurs, facilitating conversations and partnerships that help them explore financial technology solutions to improve African individuals, economies and societies. The summit holds twice a year in Washington D.C. and a selected African country and sees stakeholders from around the world assemble to chart a progressive course for fintech in Africa by mobilizing investments, hashing out enabling policies, and sharing growth strategies.
The Summit which was the seventh edition of the bi-annual event, also recognised TeamApt for Excellence in Digital Banking, PiggyVest- Excellence in Savings and InvestTech, Flutterwave-Excellence in Fintech Infrastructure, while Excellence in Blockchain Technology went to Appzone Group. Others are Excellence in Fintech investment – Future Africa, Excellence in Cryptocurrency – Paxful, Excellence in Ecosystem Research – Briter Bridges, Excellence in Cross-border Solutions – PAPSS, Excellence in Payments – Paystack, Excellence in InsurTech – Turaco, Excellence in Fintech and Lending – Payhippo, Excellence in Embedded Fintech – Cellulant and Excellence in TradeTech – AFEX. Dr. Tomisin Fashina, Group Executive, Operations & Technology, Ecobank, who received the award on behalf of the bank, said the award is well deserved as it was attributable to the Pan African Bank’s unparalleled influence in Africa and its unwavering support and numerous initiatives aimed at fostering relationship with fintechs to jointly win in the marketing place, stressing that the bank have put structures and initiatives in place to collaborate and cooperate with fintechs to facilitate the bank’s vision of financial integration of Africa.
According to him, “As a bank, one of our strategic objectives is to bank 100 million Africans, across Africa. We won’t go out there with account opening documents to do this. We believe we can achieve that by collaborating and cooperating across board, and the fintechs come into that space. We came out with ‘Ecobank as a service’, this is at the heart of why we published our sandbox to encourage fintechs, big techs and any player that want to do business in Africa to ride on our platforms and help facilitate our vision of a financially integrated Africa. We see ourselves as a key player in the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and we believe we are the ultimate bank to facilitate trade across Africa.”
Ecobank has many initiatives to support growth of fintechs on the continent. The Ecobank Fintech Challenge launched in 2017 identifies and partners with fintechs that are ready to scale, providing them with mentoring, networking, support, and opportunities to access Ecobank’s 33 African markets, as well as opportunities to integrate with existing Ecobank digital offerings. This has recorded significant results and success stories since its inception. Ecobank’s Pan-African Banking Sandbox allows partners and Fintechs across 33 African countries gain access to its application programming interface to develop innovative financial solutions. As an avenue for collaboration between Ecobank and fintechs to develop the fintech ecosystem in Africa, Ecobank’s sandbox is an era-defining game changer for Africa’s financial sector. Africa Fintech Summit, since 2018, has held six times, and has supported: Over $20 million in capital raise efforts for African startups; The launch of strategic partnerships and new businesses; Policy guideline creation; The growth of local tech and startup ecosystems; Knowledge sharing for African banking/fintech operators and regulators.
