With the aim of promoting the new age tech advancements in the African BFSI sector, leading financial and tech institutions across Africa joined hands at the 7th Edition of WFIS 2021: Africa, organised by Tradepass.
Amidst the phenomenal disruptions happening in Africa within the BFSI sector in terms of FinTech, mobile money and digital banking, top officials from Huawei, Mastercard, Oracle and Freshworks, along with 1000+ technology and business heads from 200+ leading banks, insurance and micro-finance institutions across Africa, congregated under one platform at the World Financial Innovation Series 2021: Africa, which was held virtually between August 10 to 11, 2021.
From financial inclusion to open banking to the unprecedented growth of FinTech and mobile money, the summit covered the most pressing BFSI topics concerning the continent.
While throwing light on the changing patterns in customer behaviour, Ronald Raffensperger (Senior Transformation Expert, Financial Industry, Huawei Technologies) explained: “The applications that people have been using on their mobile devices has really changed customers’ behaviour. They are beginning to be more and more comfortable with using their mobile devices for everything and so in the financial services industry we now need to be able to embrace this mobile transformation.”
Alberto Sessa, Senior Director for Financial Services with Oracle, shared key insights regarding the challenges that banks have to face today. He said: “The big challenge that the banks have today is they are not able to understand the journeys that the customer is going through the different channels.”
Meanwhile, Raghav Prasad (Mastercard’s Division President for Sub-Saharan Africa) spoke about the future of payments, stating: “The payment experience is actually the most critical element of what will drive the future of payments or how consumers will actually adopt payments.”
Some of the crucial topics that were covered during the event were ‘Strategic Initiatives to Accelerate Financial Digitalization’; ‘Banking Up: Shaping the future of Financial Services using CLOUD’; ‘Open Banking Innovation – The game-changer for Africa’; ‘Exploring the Process to Ensure Compliance of New and Innovative Digital Products’ and many others.
The event, through insightful presentations and panel discussions, covered how digital innovations in the BFSI sector is driving financial inclusion in the continent. It also shed light on the enormous VC funding that African FinTech companies have received in the past few years.
Organiser and the Sales Director of Tradepass, Praveen Venu, said: “After spending a lot of time to understand the market requirements and without compromising on the quality, every event gets into production with the sole purpose of bringing the community and the key stakeholders within that industry together.”
