By Juliet Umeh

Group Executive Director of  Technology and Operations, Access Bank Plc, Mr. Adeolu Bajemo, and other technology experts have called for collaboration between the private sector, regulators, and the legislatures to scale the achievements already made in the industry.

Speaking at an Access Bank’s technology show, Africa Fintech Foundry, AFF, he said: “The role of AFF is to look at the entire ecosystem across Nigeria and Africa as a whole and look for innovators across all fields to see how we can partner to develop solutions that solve real problems.

“It may be financial services, Agri-tech, Intro-tech, what matters is collaboration. That’s why we are here to find innovators, start-ups; creative people and fuse their ideas together to bring progress into the ecosystem.

“In the first, second and the third industrial revolutions, Africans never played a part. But things took a positive change in the fourth industrial revolution where Africans are fully participating” he added.

Corroborating him, Founder and CEO,  Sparkle, a fintech company, Mr. Uzoma Dozie, said: “What AFF is trying to do is to create great awareness on how many countries across Africa can leverage technology to make life better. We don’t expect Europeans or Americans to be doing it for us. We need to take control of the narrative.“Right now, we are all working in silos. We need more collaboration between the private sector, regulators, and the legislatures for us to really scale up.

“They always say that the biggest example of Fintech impact is in Nairobi where they use mobile money. Fortunately, in Nigeria, we’ve also seen that as well but we haven’t talked about it enough. For instance, Bank Verification Number, BVN, we need to do much more. Nigeria is a much bigger country and has 200 million people and we have infrastructural challenges in health, education, these are the areas where technology can play a role.

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In financial perspective, Nigeria has done very well. We have better mobile financial applications. We need to use it to impact more life”.Also, co-founder and former CEO of Flutterwave, Iyinoluwa Aboyiji said African entrepreneurs need a lot of encouragement, mentorships. 

He said: “This show is going to inspire them so that they can see how people who did it before did it and similarly follow the steps.

“The industry has done very well but it still suffers quite a bit from qualified and talented professionals that can help banks in particular and other institutions to be able to integrate and digitize their systems. I am sure that collaboration between the banks and the universities will provide the opportunity to turn the tide,” Aboyiji said.

Vanguard News Nigeria