Africa

Africa is the second biggest continent in the world with a population of 1.3 billion. It makes up 20% of the Earth’s total land surface. It comprises 54 countries and its people speak between 1500-2000 languages. Not each, obviously.

Africa is the most worthy market for mainstream adoption of decentralised finance. Why? I could go on and on about the underbanked, underserved populations and fragmented remittance ecosystem - while that’s all valid, the biggest pain point in my mind is currency devaluation. Volatile currencies make it difficult for Africans’ savings to hold their value. Solving for currency devaluation will provide the beachhead for the adoption of Decentralised Finance (DeFi) across Africa.

There’s a lot going on right now on personal, business and industry levels. But as I sit here in my home office over the last month talking to senior people in financial services, fintech founders and project teams all over the world, one thing keeps returning to me: “See, we didn’t need more strategy”.

Simon Taylor interviews Nathan Bostock, CEO of Santander UK. Nathan explains how Santander is embracing the tech changes facing the banking industry, and the shifting customer behaviours in their interactions with the bank with the help of digital innovation.

Hey fintech fans, I know you’ve missed me terribly the last couple of weeks. I’ve had dozens of tweets asking where I was (literally none). The rest of the 11:FS team stepped up to cover my absence and now I’m back in full swing.It’s been an incredibly busy couple of weeks for fintech and the 11:FS team in particular. We have an avalanche of content headed your way. First up this week, we went to Money20/20 Europe, interviewed everyone we could find and put on an amazing show you can find here.We’re bringing you a quick roundup of everything we did at Money20/20 Europe and plenty of links so you can get a deeper dive into anything that catches your eye.

In the first part of this examination of money management in Africa, I considered how mobile money impacted financial services provision in the region and the subsequent wave of bank and fintech collaboration. Here I turn my attention to what might come next.

1st February was Time to Talk Day, a day dedicated to mental health awareness, and opening up the conversation around it in the aim of removing the stigma. The mantra behind the day is that mental health affects us all and it’s time to talk about it.

Africa is a vast continent, with huge distances between cities, large populations, and availability of financial services varying by country. Western tech startups and businesses often think of Africa as a complex and problematic place to launch products because of the lack of infrastructure – but that’s where the opportunity lies. Here are some great examples of innovation coming out of Africa that FinTech players globally should pay attention to.

There’s a sad truth we have to accept around AI and Machine Learning (ML). Right now neither are going to end with the sci-fi films that we all know and love. Most people hear AI or ML and immediately have that in mind, but we’re a long way off from robot companions taking over the world. The global proliferation of Human-Like Intelligence is unlikely to happen anytime soon.