Ecobank Fintech Challenge offers cash prizes of up to $10k for winning ideas

Are you an African fintech looking for support and to break into new markets?

The Ecobank Fintech Challenge, which last month opened applications to African fintechs, will award $10 000 to a fintech for a winning solution that can assist the bank.

This, while the first runner-up will get $7000 and the second runner-up $5000 in cash prizes.

The challenge aims to help support fintechs that are ready to scale and provides them with support and access to Ecobank’s 33 African markets so they can grow to become pan-African fintech success stories.

The Ecobank Fintech Challenge offers fintechs the opportunity to integrate with the bank’s offerings

The challenge also offers fintechs the opportunity to potentially integrate with Ecobank’s existing digital offerings.

Applications close on 12 April.

Interested fintechs should submit details of their product as well as a demo to the challenge. These products must address one or more of a specific set of pain points, namely:

• Customer experience: Ecobank is looking for products that offer solutions and innovations in the following areas: digital customer onboarding, those that improve customer experience at branches, those that improve customer experience online, digitisation of the customer journey.
• Credit scoring: The bank is looking for innovative solutions that help improve lending to SMEs.
• Ecosystem aggregation: The bank is interested in working with innovators offering solutions on the following:
  SME/Merchants onboarding on payment integration, niche merchant aggregation and those solutions that provide easy access to non-smart phone users.
• Internal tools: The bank is looking for digital solutions that help improve performance of sales force as well as solutions that enable agents to offer more services
• Payments: The bank wants fintechs to help solve problems around offline mobile-to-mobile payments (dead zones).

In addition, the bank is willing to consider any other solution that fintechs believe will help revolutionise the banking sector in Africa.

Finalists will be selected to participate in the Ecobank Fintech Innovation Fair, while all finalists will be inducted into the Ecobank Fintech Fellowship, which will provide fellows an opportunity to explore deals, integration and commercial partnership with the Ecobank Group.

Featured image: Ecobank Fintech Challenge via Facebook