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  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

cash across borders, which is very dangerous, or, you fi nd 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 effi cient. 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 fi ntech 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 it’s in public hands, controlled by the government, so its regulated, it’s safe, it’s secure, it’s effi cient. And you provide this universal market access. I think it would be a great boost to investment in fi ntechs 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=afeff 3c1-c57911eb-909d-fa1c4ed29843 Image credit: atozmarkets.com, Fox News