“How is that possible? I’m not sure, but I think we’re going to get there,” Mr. Oligbo said, adding that the fintech scene in Africa should move beyond a focus on payments to other services like lending, credit scoring, insurance and more.
Ms. Ahmad, similarly, believes interoperability, data portability and data protection are vital, as is rethinking outmoded systems that weren’t created with African conditions in mind.
“Some of these legacy systems have not been inclusive by design,” she said.
PadiePay, an exhibitor at the conference, has created a platform that blends established trends with a distinctly African model. Much like Klarna or AfterPay help shoppers “buy now, pay later,” PadiePay helps diaspora members send money to relatives and friends before they have it in hand.
This blend of lending and remittance helps unlock more cash, more quickly, tapping into to the wealth that diaspora members are creating by working abroad, said Toyin Felipe, PadiePay’s co-founder.
“It all also about the social impact. We are impacting the continent in a positive way, and nobody else is doing it right now,” he said.
BoraBond envisions a similar impact for its platform, which enables individual investors to put as little as $100 into African government bonds, helping bridge the $100 billion infrastructure funding gap back home while earning higher returns than in most developed markets.
Perhaps anticipating the argument that these yields reflect higher risks, the company points out that there have been only 25 instances of default in the last 50 years, most of them evolving into restructurings.
“This isn’t charity. These bonds fund the building blocks of growth: schools, hospitals, roads. They’re transparent, regulated, and offer competitive yields,” Kalule Guwatudde, the company’s founder, said in a recent LinkedIn post noting that Wall Street investors’ have long diversified their portfolios in Africa. Why shouldn’t the very Africans whose futures are tied up with the continent’s development be able to join in funding it? (Remittances sent back to Africa from around the world, he pointed out, match almost perfectly the shortfall in funds for building roads, bridges and ports).
On a panel focused more on entrepreneurial lessons than fintech, Mr. Guwatudde, a serial entrepreneur and McKinsey alum, said he tries to take a realistic view of risk that comes from a place of confidence.
“I let my actions be inspired by my hopes, not my fears,” he counseled the audience.
That might as well have been the rallying cry for a Friday-afternoon discussion that sought to inspire perseverance in prospective founders while underscoring the unsung opportunities in Africa.
Thabiti Stephens’s experience taking the classic game show “Family Feud” into Africa was an object lesson, he said. After two years of self-funding Atlanta-based Steve Harvey Global found distributors — and success — in markets including South Africa, Botswana and Ghana.
“No one believed in the opportunity, and now Africa is the hottest thing on our business blueprint.”
The event attracted a variety of foreign and local officials including Georgia state legislators, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and Gov. Babajide Sanwo-Olu from Nigeria’s Lagos state. The city of Lagos is a sister-city with Atlanta, and Nigeria is the only African country with a career consulate here.
