Features

Which African Startups Rank Among Top Fintech Companies?

The list is based on an analysis of more than 1,500 companies, evaluating each firm on a number of key performance indicators, including revenue, number of users, and total funding raised.
Sputnik
A total of six African financial technology companies have made the world's top 200 fintech companies.
The list was compiled by the US financial media CNBC in collaboration with independent market research firm Statista.
The survey divided businesses into nine categories, as the performance of fintech companies in different areas of finance cannot be compared as one and the same.
The spheres included neobanking, digital payments, digital assets, digital financial planning, digital wealth management, alternate financing, alternate lending, digital banking solutions, and digital business solutions.
Here are the African companies that were featured in the top ranks:

1. 22seven (South Africa)

Headquartered in Cape Town, the company was founded in 2010 and has been operating as an independent startup since 2012.
22seven provides an app that tracks all of a user's expenses and income, and generates an automatic budget based on the user's actual spending.
CNBC lists 22seven among the top digital financial planning startups.

2. Bank Zero (South Africa)

Bank Zero, registered with the Reserve Bank of South Africa in 2018, is the country's exclusively app-driven bank for individuals and businesses.
Bank Zero is ranked in the top neobanking category, i.e. banks that operate without physical branches.

3. Kudo (Nigeria)

Nigerian firm Kudo, headquartered in Lagos, also entered the top neobanking section.
The startup, founded in 2019, enables users to manage their finances, make payments, save money and perform various banking transactions through a mobile app.
Four years after its launch, the money app for Africans has passed the six million customer milestone.
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4. OPay (Nigeria)

Another Nigerian fintech company based in Lagos, OPay, has made it to the list of top digital payment companies.
The startup currently has over 10 million registered users of the app and 500,000 agents in Nigeria.

5. Yoco (South Africa)

Continuing the digital payment enterprises angle, CNBC and Statista highlighted a South African company, Yoco, that provides a platform for businesses.
The company's ecosystem includes payments (offline and online), lending and business software.
According to Yoco's website, the venture processes more than $2 billion annually for more than 300,000 small businesses.

6. Fawry (Egypt)

Fawry, founded in 2008 in Egypt, is a digital finance platform offering financial services to consumers and businesses through different channels and locations.
The company offers more than 1,186 financial services such as paying mobile and landline bills, utilities, donating money, renewing car license, and more.
Fawry says that more than 3.06 million operations daily are processed on the firm's network.