Opportunity for African entrepreneurs to join the Visa Fintech Accelerator programme 2024. This is a 3-month programme targeted to early-stage startups that have at least developed a minimum viable product (MVP). An MVP is like a pilot version of a big solution, with limited but sufficient functionality to still offer value to real users. This is developed to help designers and innovators gain insights in terms of whether their product has potential or not.
Objectives of the VISA Africa Accelerator Programme
The objective is to select Fintech startups that are preparing to disrupt the industry and impact its ecosystems. Visa has selected priority areas for possible investment, and these include:
- Unlocking new payment flows as in mobile money transactions, account-to-account solutions, cross border transactions;
- Embedded finance and intelligence include banking-as-a-service, loyalty programmes etc.;
- Empowered SMEs and merchant solutions such as market places, point of sales, etc.;
- Payment infrastructure enablers including fraud prevention, credit scoring, etc.;
- Future of finance – think crypto and blockchain; and
- Inclusive sustainable finance including affordable solutions and climate-neutral products and services.
Eligibility
To apply for this grant, the following criteria will apply:
- Entrepreneurs must be operating in Africa or are developing solutions to expand into Africa.
- Solutions must have gained some traction and must be market tested; and
- The founding team must be skilled and knowledgeable.
As with many accelerators, entrepreneurs will have access to mentorship, experts, partnership opportunities, product perks, training and will form part of the demo day to pitch for funding.
Application
Closing date is 29 February 2024, final selection will be concluded in May. The 3-month programme will start towards the end of May. Please note that the programme is mostly online but the demo-day for pitching will be in-person. To apply, follow this link.
Selected African startups in the Visa African Accelerator portfolio
To give an idea of the kind of startups that are good fit, Visa lists the following African startups in their large portfolio:
- FloatPays in South Africa, an on-demand access to future wages for employees;
- Oze in Ghana, productivity tools for small businesses with added finance solutions; and
- Orda in Nigeria, end-to-end productivity tools for restaurants, with added finance solutions.
Further Information
One of our objectives is to empower small businesses and startups by curating funding opportunities that we come across. Refer to this page for other opportunities.
