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Nigeria’s Moni Africa, TouchandPay, Others Jostle for $50,000 Ecobank Fintech Prize

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TouchandPay

By Adedapo Adesanya

Nigerian financial technology startups, Moni Africa and TouchandPay, have made the six finalists chosen to jostle for the top price of $50,000 and admission to the Ecobank Fintech Challenge Fellowship programme.

Following extremely strong competition from over 700 fintechs from 59 countries, the two Nigerian startups will be at the grand finale on October 28 at the Ecobank Group Pan African Centre in Lomé, Togo.

The companies are part of the finalists from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Togo.

The others are Cauri Money from Senegal, DizzitUp from Togo, MaishaPay from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Paycode from South Africa.

This 5th edition of the Ecobank Fintech Challenge, sponsored by Arise, will allow all finalists to benefit from Ecobank’s Fintech Mentoring Programme.

During this programme, Ecobank will help them explore opportunities, including rolling out their products on a pan-African scale, thus opening up an opportunity to further integrate with Ecobank and potentially launch their products or services in all or part of Ecobank’s 33-country pan-African ecosystem.

Others include providing access to the group’s pan-African Banking Sandbox to test and develop their products in the pan-African market and prioritising access to Ecobank’s venture capital partners to explore funding opportunities.

Speaking on this, Mr Tomisin Fashina, Ecobank Group Executive, Operations and Technology, said, “I am impressed by the growing number of applications for the Ecobank Fintech Challenge. Applications have grown from about 412 applications in 2018 to over 700 in 2022. This demonstrates a definite paradigm shift within the African continent, with Africans’ desire to transform technological innovation into a real lever for socio-economic development.

“We thank all applicants for their participation and applaud the highly impressive quality of their entries. We look forward to partnering with them for their groundbreaking digital financial solutions to our continent’s unique challenges and to help promote financial inclusion on the continent.”

On his part, Mr Gavin Tipper, CEO of Arise, partner and co-sponsor of the Ecobank Fintech Challenge 2022 competition, said: “Fintechs play a central role in creating innovative digital solutions that improve customer experience, deliver value propositions and reduce costs.

“Our investments in fintechs are based on collaborative partnerships that advance financial inclusion on the continent and offer opportunities for mutual synergies with our balanced investment portfolio.”

The Ecobank Fintech Challenge is designed to identify innovative fintechs that are ready to grow, that we can partner with, mentor and give access to Ecobank’s 33 African markets so that they can realise their potential and become pan-African success stories. It aligns with Ecobank’s Fintech strategy of building partnerships with African fintechs to help transform digital finance and banking.

Adedapo Adesanya is a journalist, polymath, and connoisseur of everything art. When he is not writing, he has his nose buried in one of the many books or articles he has bookmarked or simply listening to good music with a bottle of beer or wine. He supports the greatest club in the world, Manchester United F.C.

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Capillary Technologies Acquires SessionM from Mastercard

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Capillary Technologies SessionM

By Modupe Gbadeyanka

A software product company established in 2012, Capillary Technologies India Limited, has acquired the customer engagement and loyalty company, SessionM, from Mastercard.

This followed a definitive agreement signed by the global leader in AI-powered customer loyalty and engagement solutions with the renowned digital payments firm.

The acquisition of SessionM is the latest in a series of strategic moves by Capillary, following its successful listing on the Indian Stock Exchange in November 2025.

With SessionM in its portfolio, Capillary reinforces its position as a global leader in enterprise loyalty, offering a leading platform to the world’s most sophisticated enterprise brands.

Mastercard has identified Capillary Technologies—consistently recognised as a Leader in The Forrester Wave as the ideal partner to lead SessionM into its next era of growth.

As part of the agreement, a specialised team within SessionM will transition to Capillary, ensuring that the platform’s deep technical expertise is preserved.

SessionM’s esteemed global customer base—which includes Fortune 500 retailers, airlines, and CPG brands—will continue to receive the same high-calibre support and service they experienced before the acquisition.

“M&A has been a key growth strategy for Capillary over the years, and as a public company, we are delivering on that promise to our shareholders and the market.

“By bringing SessionM into our portfolio, we are not just expanding our footprint across the globe; we are further strengthening our loyalty capabilities to deliver one of the industry’s most comprehensive offerings.

“Our mission remains to provide enterprises across industries with specialised, AI-native loyalty technology solutions,” the chief executive of Capillary Technologies, Aneesh Reddy, commented.

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Emergent Ventures, Others Invest $2.2m in Potpie

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potpie engineering software $2.2m capital

By Dipo Olowookere

About $2.2 million pre-seed round to help engineering teams unify context across their entire stack and make AI agents genuinely useful in complex software environments has been announced by Potpie.

Potpie was established by Aditi Kothari and Dhiren Mathur, who were determined to unify context across the entire engineering stack and enabling spec driven development.

As generative AI adoption accelerates, most tools focus on surface-level code generation while ignoring the deeper problem of context.

Large language models are powerful, but without access to system-level understanding, tooling history, and architectural intent, they struggle in real production environments.

Traditional approaches rely on senior engineers to manually hold this context together, a model that breaks down at scale and fails when AI agents are introduced.

The platform enables teams to automate high-impact and non-trivial use cases across the software development lifecycle, like debugging cross-service failures, maintaining and writing end-to-end tests, blast radius detection and system design.

It is designed for enterprise companies with large and complex codebases, starting at around one million lines of code and scaling to hundreds of millions.

Rather than acting as another coding assistant, Potpie builds a graphical representation of software systems, infers behaviour and patterns across modules, and creates structured artefacts that allow agents to operate consistently and safely.

A statement made available to Business Post on Monday revealed that the funding support came from Emergent Ventures, All In Capital, DeVC and Point One Capital.

The capital will be used to support early enterprise deployments, expand the engineering team, and continue building Potpie’s core context and agent infrastructure, it was disclosed.

“As AI makes code generation easier, the real challenge shifts to reasoning across massive, interconnected systems. Potpie is our answer to that shift, an ontology-first layer that helps enterprises truly understand and manage their software,” Kothari was quoted as saying in the disclosure.

A Managing Partner at Emergent Ventures, Anupam Rastogi, said, “In large enterprises, the real challenge is not generating code, it is understanding the system deeply enough to change it safely.

“Potpie’s ontology-first architecture, combined with rigorous context curation and spec-driven development, creates a structured model of the entire engineering ecosystem. This allows AI agents to reason across services, dependencies, tickets, and production signals with the clarity of a senior engineer. That is what makes Potpie uniquely capable of solving complex RCA, impact analysis, and high-risk feature work even in codebases exceeding 50 million lines.”

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Expert Reveals Top Cyber Threats Organisations Will Encounter in 2026

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Cyber Threats

By Adedapo Adesanya

Organisations in 2026 face a cybersecurity landscape markedly different from previous years, driven by rapid artificial intelligence adoption, entrenched remote work models, and increasingly interconnected digital systems, with experts warning that these shifts have expanded attack surfaces faster than many security teams can effectively monitor.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026, AI-related vulnerabilities now rank among the most urgent concerns, with 87 per cent of cybersecurity professionals worldwide highlighting them as a top risk.

In a note shared with Business Post, Mr Danny Mitchell, Cybersecurity Writer at Heimdal, said artificial intelligence presents a “category shift” in cyber risk.

“Attackers are manipulating the logic systems that increasingly run critical business processes,” he explained, noting that AI models controlling loan decisions or infrastructure have become high-value targets. Machine learning systems can be poisoned with corrupted training data or manipulated through adversarial inputs, often without immediate detection.

Mr Mitchell also warned that AI-powered phishing and fraud are growing more sophisticated. Deepfake technology and advanced language models now produce convincing emails, voice calls and videos that evade traditional detection.

“The sophistication of modern phishing means organisations can no longer rely solely on employee awareness training,” he said, urging multi-channel verification for sensitive transactions.

Supply chain vulnerabilities remain another major threat. Modern software ecosystems rely on numerous vendors and open-source components, each representing a potential entry point.

“Most organisations lack complete visibility into their software supply chain,” Mr Mitchell said, adding that attackers frequently exploit trusted vendors or update mechanisms to bypass perimeter defences.

Meanwhile, unpatched software vulnerabilities continue to expose organisations to risk, as attackers use automated tools to scan for weaknesses within hours of public disclosure. Legacy systems and critical infrastructure are especially difficult to secure.

Ransomware operations have also evolved, with criminals spending weeks inside networks before launching attacks.

“Modern ransomware operations function like businesses,” Mitchell observed, employing double extortion tactics to maximise pressure on victims.

Mr Mitchell concluded that the common thread across 2026 threats is complexity, noting that organisations need to abandon the idea that they can defend against everything equally, as this approach spreads resources too thin and leaves critical assets exposed.

“You cannot protect what you don’t know exists,” he said, urging organisations to prioritise visibility, map dependencies, and focus resources on the most critical assets.

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