Payments titan Visa has opened up its first innovation hub in Africa. The innovation studio which is located in Kenya is its sixth globally after setting up others in Dubai, London, Miami, San Francisco and Singapore. With the newly launched innovation hub in Africa, the payments giant wants to accelerate product development in Africa. According to the company, the studio will help bring together developers, the company’s internal and external clients as well as partners to come up with payment and commerce solutions that could revolutionize the payments space in Africa.
According to Aida Diarra, Senior Vice President and Head of Visa in Sub-Saharan Africa, “Sub-Saharan Africa is a fast-growing region with a tech-savvy population. As we continue to grow digital payments adoption in the region, our aspiration is to deepen our collaboration with clients and partners in developing solutions that are designed around the unique needs of Africa.”
She went on to say that “As a brand built on technology, Visa has driven the major technological advancements that make electronic payments what they are today. We are confident that the innovation studio will continue that legacy and cement Sub-Saharan Africa’s position as a leader in creating out of the box solutions to deal with our most pressing challenges as a region.”
Visa’s innovation hubs are quite instrumental in bringing about advancement in the payments space. For instance, the company has previously used its existing innovation hubs to come up with payments and commerce solutions tailored for Africa. It has also partnered with Nigeria’s Paga to develop solutions surrounding QR codes and NFC technology that’ll help merchants and retailers be able to accept payments seamlessly. A recent partnership with Safaricom enabling the telecommunications company’s mobile payment wing MPesa’s 150,000 merchants to be able to accept card payment was also agreed upon in Visa’s other innovation hubs.
The African innovation hub opened by Visa is a big step to bringing all of its “goodies’ closer to Africa. These innovation hubs are a means to developing new products through partnerships that’ll help Africa stay competitive on a global scale. To help promote this, the Kenyan government says it is building a technology city called Konza City with the aim of pushing innovation in the country.
While organizations like Philips and Cisco currently run similar innovation hubs in Kenya, numerous innovation hubs are already being operated in Africa’s startup capital, Nigeria.
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Ibhadojemu Lucky Emmanuel is a graduate of Education and Economics from the University of Benin. He has a passion for tech and business and has been writing professionally for over a period of five years. He's written across various topics and segments and knew tech-business was it when he first stumbled on it. He has a great passion for music and arts, and wants to visit as many countries as he can someday.
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