The Central Bank in conjunction with banks and other stakeholders in the fintech industry held the Afro-Asia Festival, Nairobi Online City Event.
The event that was a collaboration between the regulator, KCB Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Safaricom and Huawei.
The three day event themed People and Talent-Harnessing:Collaboration in Pursuit of Resilience and Grwoth Post Covid-19 was organized by the monetary authority of Singapore. It was aimed at enabling exchange of ideas through panel discussions between fintech stakeholders from accross the globe.
Panel discussions were centered on 3 areas: cashless and digital payments, next generation digital platforms and relationships between fintechs and banks. Kenya in particular has seen an upsurge of digital payments through mobile money services, digital wallets and mobile banking apps. Digital payments have seen huge changes across the value chain and payment ecosystems have grown significantly.
However, they noted that there could be fragmented issues associated with integrating APIs in merchant systems along with overall customer confidence in products.
It was noted that there no longer exist a mutually exclusive relationship between FinTech and banks. The entities are no longer purely FinTech or solely providers of banking services.
Ronald Raffensperger, senior transformation expert at Huawei noted that that there are plenty of new opportunities within the banking industry as its starts this digital transformation. Chen Zhentao, Director FSI Southern African Region at Huawei indicated that cashless systems will go a long way in streamlining ecosystem processes across various industries acknowledging that the future willb e a digital society.
