There has been a rising trend of fintech infrastructure participants around the globe over the years. In the last years, a number of businesses in Africa have emerged to provide such services.
Credrails, a Kenyan open financial infrastructure firm is one of such. The startup has acquired an undisclosed amount of initial money to help it link Africa to its API.
This API links every African country, making it simple and fast for developers to create for Africa. The company already has a physical presence in Nigeria and a connection with 250 million accounts across 33 countries.
Its aim is to connect all of Africa, which has been aided by an undisclosed amount of initial investment received last month. SoftBank, Unicorn Growth, Samos Ventures, and Precursor are among the investors.
The future of financial services, according to Clara Odero, the company’s CEO and co-founder, is dependent on developers’ skills to create novel solutions while swiftly upgrading current ones.
Credrails provide them with open and secure access to a variety of rich data sources. Credrails products also promote cross-service interoperability, resulting in rapid and more inexpensive money transfers across Africa and beyond.
Techuild’s Take
Every transaction you complete on a ride-hailing or e-commerce platform, bank, or fintech app is based on interactions that enable you and billions of other customers to use these services; these transactions are known as application programming interfaces (APIs).
Through the use of APIs and data aggregation services, open finance infrastructure enables third-party financial services with access to consumer banking, transaction, and other financial data from banks and non-bank financial institutions.
Once in place, it will enable customers, financial institutions, and third-party service providers to network accounts and data across institutions for usage by consumers, financial institutions, and third-party service providers.
Over the years, the number of API fintech firms in Africa has exploded, with Mono, Okra, OnePipe, Pngme, Bloc, and Stitch gaining funding to further their goals.
Credrails was created to make it easier to reach the whole African market, rather than just the top four or five, by linking all of the continent’s financial services into a single API.
Since its introduction in August 2020, the firm has grown 400% month over month, and it intends to be operating in five markets by the end of 2022.
Given the importance of API fintech companies in the development of open banking, it is reasonable to assume that these firms will help Africa attain financial inclusion.
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