By Adedapo Adesanya
Sub-Saharan Africa’s payment infrastructure company, AppZone, has been announced the winner of the Excellence in Blockchain Technology Award at the 2022 edition of the Africa Fintech Summit, recently held in Washington DC.
Now in its 7th year, the Africa Fintech Summit brings the entrepreneurs and opportunities revolutionizing finance in Africa to the world’s stage, through a series of pan-African summits, roundtables, virtual events, and investor missions.
The Africa Fintech Summit Awards platform is a longstanding tradition designed to recognize African fintech stakeholders for their actions in enabling the continent’s start-up ecosystem, accelerating innovation, and driving financial inclusion and literacy.
AppZone was chosen for this award in recognition of its efforts in leading the adoption of blockchain technology for payment processing on the continent and achieving interoperability with the infrastructure of existing traditional financial ecosystem stakeholders on its blockchain payment network, ZONE.
The initiative is Africa’s first private blockchain network that connects Banks and fintechs together without any intermediary to enable frictionless digital payments while empowering previously excluded financial institutions to participate.
It has been adopted by over 16 commercial banks in Nigeria and is expanding to other financial institutions, fintechs, and commercial banks across Africa.
Speaking on the company’s recognition, co-founder and CEO, Mr Obi Emetarom, expressed his delight about the organisation’s emergence amongst so many other well-deserving companies creating value in the ecosystem.
“The increasing maturity of the fintech ecosystem in Africa is impressive, and we are happy to be a part of the story of progress for the continent. Whether as an entrepreneur, investor, traditional financial institution, or customer, it is an exciting time to be involved in African Fintech. Even more rewarding is the joy of getting recognition for the solutions we create at AppZone.
“We remain committed to our mission of connecting every financial store of value in Africa to the rest of the world. Recognitions like this will only spur us on to give more to Africa’s fast-evolving Fintech landscape,” Mr Obi said.
Every year since its inception, the Africa Fintech Summit brings together the most active and influential minds driving the growth of Africa’s fintech sector while recognizing excellence in entrepreneurship and innovation across the Fintech ecosystem in Africa.
Awardees at the Africa Fintech Summit 2022 were selected with a hybrid approach of leveraging public nominations and feedback from the AFTS Advisory Board.
Through its Layer-1 Blockchain network, Appzone digitizes fiat payments and enables the transition to digital currencies while connecting previously excluded financial institutions into an all-inclusive payment ecosystem.
In December of 2021, Appzone launched Zone, Africa’s first decentralized payment network, which allows participating institutions to connect directly with each other and perform payment transactions without an intermediary while completely automating settlement, reconciliation, and dispute management.
Aduragbemi Omiyale