Investment
Quartz: All You Need to Know About Africa's Four (Six?) Unicorns By Tawanda Karombo
THERE IS A WAVE OF OPTIMISM around the first four African startups to hit a $1 billion valuation. Emerging markets investment analysts are betting on fintech and e-commerce, staked on the continent’s tech-savvy population, to provide even more unicorn status companies for the region. Flutterwave—Founded: 2016; Industry: fintech; Secret weapon: An office in San Francisco gives it access to a bigger pool of venture capitalists Interswitch—Founded: 2002; Industry: fintech; Secret weapon: Attracting investors that hadn’t thought to look towards Africa
cash across borders, which is very dangerous, or, you find alternatives. If you have a CBDC, you take out all the frictions from having a Balkanized, fractured remittance system. If you have a South African CBDC and a Nigerian CBDC and you make them interoperable, you can have almost instantaneous, almost free transactions between them, if those two CBDCs are efficient. And you can be fully compliant with foreign-exchange controls. It removes the remittance payments from the correspondent banking system, which was not really not build for this. Quartz: How would CBDCs fit in the context of growing investment in Africa’s fintech industry? Think about the Google or the Apple Play store. Why are they successful? Because they provide developers with access to the entire customer base. CBDC would be the same thing, except that
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Fawry—Founded: 2008; Industry: fintech; Secret weapon: Egypt’s regulatory changes mean licensing from the central bank Jumia—Founded: 2012; Industry: e-commerce; Secret weapon: Achieving unicorn status first Chipper Cash and Opay—Depending on how you define “unicorn,” these two could be on the list, too https://qz.com/africa/2032255/africas-4-1bfintech-unicorns-could-pave-the-way-for-startups
it’s in public hands, controlled by the government, so its regulated, it’s safe, it’s secure, it’s efficient. And you provide this universal market access. I think it would be a great boost to investment in fintechs in Africa, because everybody knows, “This start-up, when they build something that is compliant with what the CBDC does, then they can tap directly into the CBDC system [and they] have access to a billion people as potential customers.” I think Africa is so big as a market, that this would really be an extremely attractive value proposition for investors. https://techio.co/how-africa-could-become-aworld-leader-in-central-bank-digital-currencies/ Original article: https://qz.com/africa/2015047/ africas-central-banks-are-exploring-digitalcurrencies/?utm_source=email&utm_ medium=daily-brief&utm_content=afeff3c1-c57911eb-909d-fa1c4ed29843 Image credit: atozmarkets.com, Fox News DAWN
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