Fintech News Dominates Holiday Headlines + Insights From CES 2017

The team at the African Tech Round-up has returned from the Festive break, and so we’re officially back to our normal programming.

This week, we’re catching up on some biggest stories that broke while we were on holiday, including Standard Bank acquiring Firepay— the company behind the SnapScan payments app, the George Soros-backed VC, Leapfrog raising $800 million to invest in Africa’s finance scene, and the Nigerian fintech startup, Paystack, closing a $1.3 million seed investment round involving Tencent, Comcast Ventures and Singularity Investments. There’s no doubt about it, folks. Fintech is definitely a hot ticket at the moment!

At the tail-end of this episode, I chats with Nicholus Steward, founder and CEO of the Swazi Bridge Project. He attended the world’s biggest tech show, CES 2017 in Las Vegas two weeks ago, and he’ll be sharing insights he gleaned from the event.

First published on AfricanTechRoundup.com.

 

Discussing Inclusive Value Chains With Simon Carpenter of SAP Africa

We are one week away from returning to our regular coverage of the week’s biggest digital, tech and innovation headlines, once the team at the African Tech Round-up returns from the Festive break.

This week’s show features yet another sneak preview of Season 6 of the African Tech Conversations series. I chat with Simon Carpenter, Chief Technology Officer at SAP Africa, and with 2017 well and truly underway, I find out what innovation trend Simon is most excited about.

Now, as many of you know, last week the world’s largest tech conference, CES 2017, went down in Las Vegas, Nevada last week. If you follow us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram— which of course I encourage you to do, then you’ll know that this year we teamed up with the Swazi Bridge Project to bring you Africa-focussed highlights from the expo, courtesy of CEO and Founder of the Swazi Bridge Project, Nicholus Steward.

Be sure to take in the insights we gleaned from CES 2017– like this conversation that Nick had with Steve Perlman, CEO and founder of Artemis:

I’m looking forward to having Nicholus on the show next week to unpack some of the more interesting announcements made at CES, and to discuss key issues that emerged which are likely to impact the continent in 2017.

First published on AfricanTechRoundup.com.