(African) Fintech revenue could grow 8X to reach $30 billion by 2025 – McKinsey & Company

As the fastest growing start-up industry in Africa, African fintech raised over $1.3 billion in 2021 alone, the success of fintech companies is being driven by several trends, including increasing smartphone ownership, falling internet costs, expanding network coverage, and a young, rapidly growing and rapidly urbanizing population. [i]

African fintech has a significant impact on daily life on the continent, and with its current upward trend, it could be perfect to rapidly advance Africa’s global competitiveness with an increase in the export of fintech services globally.

These fertile grounds have challenges. Regulatory uncertainty and differences between countries are a bottleneck limiting the expansion of financial inclusion in Africa. This has led the continent’s fintech to call for a pan-African regulatory body to define comprehensive regulatory policies for regions rather than countries.

Certain authorities and the private sector work continuously to offer regulatory political frameworks for companies, customers and economies, with the current focus on:

1. Regulations – banks and digital-only fintech are influenced by, but independently regulated from, the traditional financial system regulations.
2. Anti-money laundering controls – multiple regulatory bodies are insisting on compliance, worldwide there is a crackdown on non-compliant companies. This requires verification of information received from the client to avoid fraudulent, terrorist or other illegal activities being facilitated, supported by other processes such as Know Your Customer.
3. Consumer Centrism – fintech must be vigilant in consumer education, especially the implications of services and products that did not exist before, and protecting the consumer from being exploited.
4. Protection of privacy and data security – stored personal consumer information is vulnerable to cyber attacks. Fintech companies must comply and have necessary security systems and protocols to secure sensitive data.

The 2020 Global Fintech Index lists the top 100 fintech ecosystems, 4 sub-Saharan African cities that lead this sector, namely Johannesburg, Nairobi, Lagos and Cape Town, and account for most of the continent’s funding for fintech startups.

The countries represented by the 4 cities above have taken significant steps towards regulatory systems designed to protect stakeholders. Each country’s approach to regulation shares similarities, while others are unique to the challenges of their market. What is clear is that these regulations are evolving rapidly as access to technology enables this market to scale significantly.

Regardless of the size of the fintech, these changes become prohibitive to the fintech’s success due to the cost and/or inconvenience caused since they affect all areas of the customer relationship lifecycle.

Bizzamm, hails from South Africa, home to 2 of the 4 African cities represented in the top 100 Global Fintech Index. Bizzamm is an easy-to-use, intuitive, affordable tool that empowers its customers to automate their business processes and addresses many (if not all) current regulatory requirements.

Bizzamm is the future of affordable business processing – providing absolute control with an all-in-one tamper-proof, end-to-end document management solution on blockchain, offering management, solutions and control over the growing regulatory requirements discussed here, most importantly, with an emphasis on customer convenience.

Regarding the 4 focuses highlighted above, Bizzamm offers a non-exhaustive list to help with and manage compliance; such as the flexibility to create custom document templates; make use of verification; validation and mandatory fields. By setting automatic reminders for actions required by specific parties after specific dates, the highly secure but flexible cloud environment in which Bizzamm resides keeps data safe and provides easy access when searching for documents. Role and permission-based access allows only authorized access and only authorized changes to documents. Bizzamm offers an electronic signature, upon completion of a document it is anchored to the blockchain, providing an instantly unique digital fingerprint, with a permanent record of creation and making it tamper-proof.

The regulations surrounding the secure collection and storage of sensitive customer information, how information is processed, are becoming more robust, comprehensive and enforceable worldwide. Bizzamm enables businesses to become compliant in a simple, practical and affordable way that is customer friendly.

Find out how Bizzamm can impact your business by ordering a free demo at Bizzamm.com/demo

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[i] McKinsey & Company, Fintech in Africa: The end of the beginning, 30 August 2022.
[ii] McKinsey & Company, Fintech in Africa: The end of the beginning, 30 August 2022.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Bizzamm (Pty) Ltd.