The top 10 companies shortlisted for the Barclays Accelerator 2017 Africa Programme have been announced at an event held in Rise Cape Town, South Africa. Present at the event were Investors as well as Tech and Startup experts and Mentors to help take the 10 finalists to the next level.
Barclays Africa launched Rise CapeTown, a fintech innovation hub that convenes a global startup community breaking the frontiers of financial services and unlocking Africa’s potential.
The successful participants, all focused on providing fintech solutions in Africa, will partake in a 13-week growth acceleration programme at the Rise hub, kicking off today, 9 May 2017. The aim is to achieve two years’ progress over a period of three months.
Applications were received from fintech startups in all 52 African countries, with the aim to discover the next Paypal by collaborating with the fintech entrepreneurs disrupting Africa’s fledgling financial scene.
The 2017 programme participants are:
- Flexpay (Kenya): Provides an automated and secured layaway system that manages the purchase of goods. Customers can choose to pay for goods over varying periods of time.
- Howler (South Africa): Provides an event commerce platform. Howler is the consolidation of three powerful events and entertainment platforms, designed at the highest benchmark of service and technology, helping consumers and event organizers to create moments that matter.
- Spatialedge (South Africa): Focused on consumer analytics and targeting. Using a proprietary consumer database, Spatialedge enriches and verifies their clients’ customers by spatially locating them, mapping them, and use advanced analytics to help clients locate and target new customers.
- AI (USA): Designs artificial intelligence solutions for the banking industry, helping banks better engage and support their customers at scale; significantly reducing the costs of servicing and acquiring customers through the use of chatbots.
- The Sun Exchange (South Africa): The Sun Exchange enables anyone anywhere to own and earn from solar panels powering Africa, India and other developing economies. The exchange allows for collaborative solar finance using blockchain technology.
- Byte Money (South Africa): Provides solutions that help avoid mismanagement of payments in the ‘informal finance sector’. Byte Money taps into and revolutionizes existing third-world payment channels and integrates them with first-world technologies.
- Avenews-GT (Israel): Designed a digital trading platform based on blockchain technology, modernizing agricultural trade by connecting food wholesalers to food producers directly, reducing distribution costs, creating financial security, and providing chain transparency.
- FOMO Travel (South Africa): Provides a gamification model for travel, which gives the user the opportunity to reduce their financial obligation through crowdfunding, rewards and incentives.
- Kapitalwise (USA): Simplifies the investment process for millennials by automating their investment decisions using machine learning and predictive analytics.
- eCOIDA (South Africa): eCOIDA is an online insurance technology platform; a central database that connects all role players in real-time, creating an accurate workflow, fraud-free, paperless claims processing platform.
To be updated and read more about these companies, you can check out Rise Cape Town.
