All is set for this year’s edition of the annual Innovation Fair & Awards ceremony organised by Ecobank Transnational Incorporated scheduled to hold at the bank’s global headquarters in Lome, the Togolese capital, on August 30.
The ceremony, which is in its second year, will feature the awards of a total sum of $22,000 Ecobank Africa Fintech Prize to the top innovator and two runners-up. The top innovator will coast home with US$10,000, while the first runner up goes home with US$7,000, as the second runner up settles for US$5,000 .
Already, eleven Fintech start-ups from seven African countries and two European countries had been shortlisted as finalists of the Africa-focused technology startup competition .
The finalists, which will be honoured at the event , include: Lypa (Kenya), Wallet.ng (Nigeria), Nala (Tanzania), Litee (Benin), SESO Global (South Africa), InvestED (Sierra Leone), Eversend (France), Secapay (Nigeria), Virtual Identity (South Africa), MojiPay (Togo) and Awamo
(Germany).
At the ceremony, the start-ups will exhibit and pitch their products to a jury, which will then pick the three top finalists.
However, all the eleven finalists will be enrolled by Ecobank into its six-month Fintech Fellowship where they will benefit from an opportunity to further explore partnerships with the Ecobank Group, including multinational product roll-out support, service provider & ecosystem partner deals and technical & mentoring support.
The 2017 fellows of the Innovation Challenge, which was designed in partnership with Konfidants, an advisory firm, and supported by several partners across Africa and globally, include Kudi.ai (Nigeria), SafePay (Kenya), Paylater (Nigeria), Wallettec (South Africa), Invest Mobile (Ghana), and Payvite (Algeria).
It would be recalled that back in April this year, ETI started the process by inviting African fintech entrepreneurs for the second Ecobank Fintech Challenge.
The Challenge offers a unique opportunity for African startups to promote their Fintech solutions through Ecobank’s service provider partner deals, and potentially to partner Ecobank in rolling-out their solutions across Ecobank’s 33 markets in Africa.
