FinTech Services: Is it African Enough?
So Fintech; to be honest; is really just a buzz word about access. Access to financial services that are accessible through technology.
Simple, Right?
If you think about it, providing individuals in an African space with access to financial services is quite frankly an enormous challenge.
If it is not the lack of electronic banking culture with the general population, we have the challenge of power outages, software system’s failing for their design not meeting a historic demand of 50 years back. A time when frequent software upgrades were not as common as they are now, due to increased population, trends in market and demand and the change of what exactly is the product of demand for financial services in individual african country contexts.
Financial institutions, in Africa, all through the continent have had to find ways that innovate and meet a steady growing population, market, currency, economy and short- and long-term government rules. Our culture and means of production do not move or match the pace of our 1st world counterparts.
Thats definitely not a bad thing.
Why?
On top of learning lessons from systems that worked or don’t in a First World economy, we have the freedom, vibrancy and drive to introduce solutions that work best for our African cultural backgrounds. That means we can incoorperate our culture beliefs and life lessons that make our communities have provided with the lessons learnt from historic failures in our markets.
Being Ubuntu; exploiting #Africanacity and meeting the needs that entrepreneurs, families, farmers, immigrants and marketeers have is an essential part of Financial Technology innovation in Africa, in 2020. It is at the core of what we on the beautiful continent can do to run and sustain business with each other.
Most African countries have an inconceivably amount of humour associated with the political affairs merging into social-economic impacts. For example; currency fluctuation of unheard proportion, unpredictable financial impact when leaders don’t leave power and raw materials run out which were a countries sore source of income. We have our own hilarious stories; ministers getting exposed from large amounts of cash being dug out in backyards to presidents wearing African print mask like a meme during national addresses about COVID-19. We have to find the humour in the trying times as well as in our own growth as a people, communities and a continent.
So those who wonder, how different are the First World counterparts and their financial services? I did an interview, I’ll publish a series about it entitled Greener Money Grass.
Let me know what other fintech questions you may have in the comments, leave a clap and keep an eye out for more.
