The Visa bootcamp will power collaboration opportunities between early stage technology companies, Visa and financial institutions from across Africa for potential integration.

10 participants were selected from strong pool of 122 applicants from 12 countries including Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Ghana, South Africa, Cameroon, Nigeria, Belgium, Switzerland, UK, Franca and the US who pitched their fintech solutions to an expert panel for a spot at Visa’s first innovation bootcamp in Africa.

Visa Country Manager for East Africa, Sunny Walia said, “The finalists will get the opportunity to gain knowledge and insights from experts at Visa, as well as gain access to Visa API’s and tools, and Nest’s resources to scale their start-up through Africa and beyond.”

The Visa Bootcamp’s intensive content is designed to fuel all early-stage FinTech companies with a vision to revolutionisefinancial services for Africans with financial inclusion and peer-to-peer or merchant payments being of specific focus to thisprogramme.

“We’re excited about helping our great corporate partners unlock the potential by working alongside startups as there are unlimited possibilities and opportunities.” Aaron Fu, Managing Partner at Nest Africa said. “The Visa Bootcamp brings together marquee innovators solving critical challenges in the FinTech landscape onstructured platform for these highly promising businesses to explore partnerships with Visa and its partner bank network, as well as have one-on-one interactions with potential funders.”

Meet the companies selected 

1.  Okhi: Location, picture and mobile based solution to facilitateonboarding / verification process for financial institutions.

2. Eat Out: KenyaMobile based payments and rewards solution for restaurants.

3. Kwanji: Affordable & accessible FX execution platform for African SMEs.

4. Overview Technologies: Mobile money based Personal financial management application and payments solution.
5. Lakt: Personal financial management and financial literacy app targeting millennials.
6. SokoWatch: Feature phone enabled consumer product fulfillment solution between informal retailers and large FMCG distributors.
7. Ajala Studios: Native language and speech processing application deployable within financial institutions.

8. Data Integrated: Mobile Point of Sale solution for SMEs.

9. Bamba POS: Cloud based mobile Point of Sale and inventory management solution for SMEs.

10. Lipisha: Value added mobile payments aggregator for businesses.

The 4-day  Mettā, and concludes with a Demo Day, scheduled for 27th March 2017.programme commences on 24th March 2017 in Nairobi.