Barclays Africa announces partnership with 9 fintech companies

Barclays Africa which trades as Absa in South Africa has announced plans to collaborate with nine financial technology (fintech) companies to explore new technology-based services that could prompt significant improvements for consumers.

The fintech companies are among ten businesses that participated in the 2017 Barclays Accelerator in collaboration with Techstars.

Among the fintechs are Abe.ai (from the US), Kapitalwise (US), as well as FOMO Groupand Byte Money from South Africa, to test the potential to scale up and roll out the solutions across the ten countries where Barclays Africa Group has operations.

Others include Howler, FlexPay, Spatialedge, Sun Exchange and Avenews-GT.

Yasaman Hadjibashi, Chief Creation Officer at Barclays Africa Group says the solutions created by these companies are among the top innovations in the fintech space in the world right now.

“Any of these solutions could have the potential to solve some of the biggest challenges facing the financial services sector in Africa,” Hadjibashi added.

Fintech developments

According to Hadjibashi , the banking group is exploring the potential services and products developed by a range of companies, including the following: