Kampala city ranked one of the top fintech cities in Africa

TECHNOLOGY

Amidst all the challenges Uganda as a country and Kampala as its capital city still face when it comes to ease of doing business and supporting startup businesses, it is still ranked one of the best places to set up a financial technology (fintech) start up on the African continent.

In the first-ever global fintech index rankings released recently, Kampala came out 7th on the African continent's top locations for fintech startups with Nairobi the capital of Eastern neighbor Kenya coming second on the continent and Kigali the capital to Rwanda the South Western neighbor to Uganda coming 6th.  

The top fintech startup city on the continent according to the report is Johannesburg in South Africa with Cape Town coming in 4th on the list which cemented South Africa as having the best fintech startup eco-system on the continent.  

However, East Africa as a region seems to be the most preferred destination for fintech startups on the continent with three cities in three different countries making the top 10 list.

The global fintech index city rank shows the cities with the most friendly and valuable fintech startup ecosystems on the globe and also reflects the cities which attract the most funding and investment in financial technology startups.

Only four cities in Africa, however, made it to the top 100 fintech start-up friendly cities in the world and those were Lagos, Johannesburg, Cape Town and Nairobi with the rest of the top 10 coming in outside the global top 100 global fintech start-up friendly cities in the world.

In total 238 cities were ranked on the globe with Nairobi having a global rank of 63, Kigali 132 and Kampala 168 as East Africa's representatives. This research was put together by fintech research firm Findexable, the Africa Fintech Network and the global startup funding database among others.

Among the important discoveries the research revealed is the fact that unlike in the Western world where fintech startups are disrupting established financial giants, in Africa these companies are not shaking the establishment as much as they are bringing onboard the unbanked and unreached in a largely low developed financial industry.    

With products like mobile money, online payments processing, lending and investing, these startups are plugging a huge gap that was previously unattended to by the established traditional financial institutions.

The report also noted that there is still a lot of room for expansion, growth and set up of more financial technology (fintech) startups across the continent with global financial giants like MasterCard, PayPal, Visa and Stripe all having invested in startups on the continent over the past two or so years as a result.

A few months back emerging global financial players from the Far East invested over 210 million dollars (sh. 779.14 billion) in Nigerian fintech startups OPay and Palm Pay a sign that a lot more money is going to flow into the continent whose financial sector is considered to be the youngest and fastest-growing on the globe.

This keeps it very attractive to international investors and research shows it will continue to attract a lot of investments in the medium term