Kenya’s Kocela Limited emerged at the top of the Payments and Transfers category for the African Fintech Awards that were held in Sandton Convention Center in South Africa. The 2017 version of the awards marked the second installment of the program that was coordinated with Finance Indaba Africa, which is the largest conference and expo for finance professionals in the continent.
The event had received more than 5000 applications from Africa and Asia. Kocela made a cut to the finals together with Kenya’s Cellulant that won in the same award in 2016. Ideally, Kocela, which is a fintech firm that focuses on mobile payment solutions pitched using the KCB Banking App. At the moment, it operates in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi. In its ascend to gainful scaling, Kocela has worked with key financial institutions such as the aforementioned KCB Bank Limited, Credit Bank Limited and Spire Bank Limited. It has also served the Standard Media Group Limited, among other clients.
KCB Bank Limited has branches in the markets that Kocela operates in, and its mobile app is one of the most downloaded banking in East Africa on Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile platforms. The reason for this popularity has been attributed to the app’s feature set that packages useful tools such as M-PESA integration, M-VISA and PesaLink. PesaLink, for instance, is critical for tranfering funds from one bank account to another, which is why more banking apps such as Equity’s Eazzy Banking integrated it a few weeks ago.
That aside, other winners in the African Fintech Awards were Ovamba that topped the Lending & Financing group, The Sun Exchange for Blockchain & Bitcoin, to mention a few. The event was also unique in the sense that there were two overall winners; EasyEquities (InvesTech) and ThisIsme (Innovative Banking).
Registrations for the 2018 run have already opened and can be accessed via this link.
