(2 minutes read)
- A good number of Africa’s newly emerging unicorns valued at over US$1billion each – focus on digital payments
- Nigeria’s Interswitch, Flutterwave etc which offer payment cards and digital payments and processes to most of Nigeria’s electronic bank, government and corporate transactions, are some of the companies made big during the pandemic
ach – focus on digital payments. Nigeria’s Interswitch, Flutterwave etc which offer payment cards and digital payments and processes to most of Nigeria’s electronic bank, government and corporate transactions, are some of the companies made big during the pandemic.
Lagos is attracting the lion’s share of investments after putting behind Nairobi’s crown as leader of Africa’s tech revolution. Nigeria entices investors with the world’s seventh biggest population. But there are many inefficient processes to improve and 95% of transactions are still in cash, entailing huge costs including the need for large bank branches to store the cash. Nearly 36% of adult Nigerians still do not have access to financial services.
Nigeria has attracted more than US$1billion in venture capital investment in the last two years. In one week in November 2019, the inflow aggregated to US$400m: Visa invested US$200m in Interswitch, a group of investors led by Sequoia Capital China and SoftBank Ventures Asia invested US$120m in OPay, and China’s Tassion invested US$40millio9n in PalmPay. This was a significant proportion of the total US$1.2bn invested via venture capital tech in Africa in 2019
