Ecobank bags Excellence in Fintech-Banking Relationship award

BY EMEKA EJERE

Ecobank Group has been conferred with the “Excellence in Fintech-Banking Relationships” award by Africa Fintech Summit.

The banking group received the award at the summit’s meeting in Washington DC, United States, in recognition of its support for the fintech’s growth on the continent.

The Africa Fintech Summit is a global knowledge-sharing platform for innovators, regulators and entrepreneurs, facilitating conversations and partnerships that help them explore financial technology solutions to improve Africans, economies and societies.

The event holds twice yearly in Washington D.C. and a selected African country and sees stakeholders from around the world assemble to chart a course for fintech in Africa by mobilising investments, hashing out enabling policies, and sharing growth strategies.

The summit, which was the seventh of the bi-yearly event, also recognised TeamApt for Excellence in Digital Banking, PiggyVest- Excellence in Savings and InvestTech, Flutterwave-Excellence in Fintech Infrastructure, while Excellence in Blockchain Technology went to Appzone Group.

Group Executive, Operations and Technology, Ecobank, Dr. Tomisin Fashina, who received the award for the bank, said the award was well-deserved as it was attributable to the Pan-African bank’s influence in Africa and its support and initiatives aimed at fostering relationship with Fintechs to win in the marketing place, stressing that the bank have put structures and initiatives in place to collaborate and cooperate with fintechs to facilitate the bank’s vision of financial integration of Africa.

He said, “As a bank, one of our strategic objectives is to bank 100 million Africans, across Africa. We won’t go out there with account opening documents to do this. We believe we can achieve that by collaborating and cooperating across board, and the fintechs come into that space.

“We came out with ‘Ecobank as a service’, this is at the heart of why we published our sandbox to encourage fintechs, big techs and any player that want to do business in Africa to ride on our platforms and help facilitate our vision of a financially integrated Africa.

“We see ourselves as a key player in the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and we believe we are the ultimate bank to facilitate trade across Africa.”

The Ecobank Fintech Challenge launched in 2017 identifies and partners with fintechs that are ready to scale, providing them with mentoring, networking, support, and opportunities to access Ecobank’s 33 African markets, as well as opportunities to integrate with Ecobank digital offerings.