MNO’s across Africa are continuously investing in their network and coverage infrastructure. Locally, we’ve seen organizations like Safaricom partner with Google to drive smartphone adoption via the Lipa Mdogo Mdogo initiative. Similarly, players in the Buy-Now-Pay-Later space also facilitate rapid smartphone adoption and ownership. This increase in smartphone penetration has contributed to the rise of digital solutions that has enabled people to: save & borrow money instantly, conduct P2P cross border money transfers, invest in local and global equities and crypto currencies among a plethora of digital financial offerings.
The common theme here is democratization. In the US for example, platforms like Robinhood are popular for pioneering commission-free trading while helping their users learn and invest at their own pace. This is a significant paradigm shift with respect to investing that traditionally locked out a large portion of retail investors. Locally, Standard Chartered Bank recently launched the Shilingi Fund which is a low-ticket money market fund for Kenyans. This all points to the fact that there is a large pool of untapped funds and potential returns waiting to be realized.
By way of first principle thinking, financial literacy is paramount to ensuring consumers utilize these digital financial offerings in an informed manner. Hisa, a pan-African wealth management platform, is an emerging leader in the financial literacy and investing domain. Launched in December 2021, Hisa’s ambitious goal is to empower Africans to be financially independent by providing simplified investment solutions and educational content. Hisa currently operates in Kenya where Users can purchase Kenyan stocks from the NSE and fractional shares of US equities courtesy of their partnership with DriveWealth LLC and Faida Investment Bank. They have achieved this by giving their users the comfort and assurance of bank-level security for the application, which secures data and trades, as well as a simple and easy-to-use mobile application across Android and iOS devices.
Hisa and Smile Technology Partnership
It’s important to note that platforms like Hisa typically onboard their users remotely. As a result, it is fundamental that these platforms can collect KYC as stipulated by the regulators. To solve this, Hisa has partnered with Smile Identity for digital KYC at scale.
Smile Identity is the ideal KYC provider for Hisa’s pan-African play. This is because they can validate over 300 million African identities through a single API and have optimized facial verification technology for Africans. They have built proprietary technology and trained the algorithms extensively on African datasets which enables face as a biometric on any smartphone on the continent. In addition, Smile Identity offers document verification across the continent and more importantly they have a local presence in multiple markets. This contributes to a thorough understanding of the respective markets and their evolving laws and regulations, which helps partners like Hisa always remain abreast and compliant.
In conclusion, transformation and economic prosperity is a potential by-product of entities with a pan-African focus joining hands and solving hard problems or creating opportunities across the continent. What a time to be in Africa!
