Egyptian fintechs score with sandbox after AUC Venture Lab, Temenos deal

Fintech startups in Egypt will be able to test their new products and services in a sandbox, following an announcement today that university accelerator AUC Venture Lab will collaborate with banking software company Temenos.

The deal was announced in a press release today by Geneva-based Temenos and AUC Venture Lab, which is located at The American University in Cairo .

Among other things, the agreement will see Temenos provide a sandbox service to the startups that utilise the accelerator. Over the past five years the AUC Venture Lab has accelerated 115 startups.

The sandbox is a non-production cloud-based version of the Temenos T24 core banking system. It will enable startups to integrate their solutions with banking data and functionality as well as to test them for scalability and robustness.

It will also allow them to plug into the 11 major financial institutions in Egypt already running Temenos T24.

Temenos and AUC Venture Lab will also collaborate on events and other community-building activities.

The agreement between AUC Venture Lab and Temenos will see Egyptian fintech startups being able to tap a sandbox service

It is envisaged that the AUC Venture Lab would play host to Temenos events, such as the upcoming “Meet the Marketplace” in October of this year, where global fintechs who are existing members of Temenos Marketplace will be invited to showcase and demo their solutions to a number of Egyptian financial institutions.

Launched at the start of 2016, the Temenos MarketPlace is one of the world’s largest fintech stores, with over 100 applications from more than 50 fintech providers.

Commenting on the announcement, Temenos Middle East & Africa regional director Jean-Paul Mergeai noted that the Egyptian market is currently in “an ideal” position to take advantage of a rich fintech ecosystem that will help drive digital transformation across the banking industry.

Ayman Ismail, who is the Abdul Latif Jameel Endowed Chair of Entrepreneurship at AUC’s School of Business and Director of AUC Venture Lab, added that the partnership with Temenos offers the accelerator’s startups the opportunity to build their products on the Temenos platform and to accelerate their development cycle.

“This contributes to faster rollout of new innovative products and services to the Egyptian market,” added Ismail.

Featured image: A street scene in Cairo (8moments via Pixabay)