Nigerian global share dealing app Trove has been named winner of the fourth edition of the Ecobank Fintech Challenge, winning a US$15,000 prize and a place in the bank’s Fintech Challenge Fellowship programme.
Ecobank Group hosts its Fintech Challenge each year, with the five finalists of this year’s edition emerging from over 890 entrants from 44 countries.
Trove was announced as winner at a virtual grand finale on December 9, streamed live from Accra, Ghana, which saw each of the five finalists pitching to a tech-savvy jury. The startup’s app enables African-based financial institutions and individuals to buy, sell and trade any publicly traded equity, bond or exchange traded fund across US, Chinese, Nigerian or other global stock markets.
Mali’s OKO Finance, with its affordable crop insurance products – distributed via mobile phone – for smallholder farmers, came second, while Ghana’s Motito came third with its “buy now, pay later” solution. First, second and third placed winners received cash prizes of US$15,000, US$12,000 and US$10,000 respectively, and were also inducted into the Ecobank Fintech Challenge Fellowship programme.
“Winning the 2021 Ecobank Fintech Challenge is a real honour and publicly validates the huge potential of our app to widen asset ownership. I applaud the Ecobank Group for bringing African fintechs into the limelight through this competition and for providing us with continued support through its Fellowship programme. The opportunity to partner with Ecobank and roll-out our app across 33 sub-Saharan African countries would provide the icing on the cake by massively accelerating our growth,” said Oluwatomi Solanke, CEO of Trove.
Ecobank Group CEO Ade Ayeyemi said the array of fintech services and solutions entered in this year’s edition was of such a high standard that the jury faced a really difficult task whittling the hundreds of entrants down to the final five and, ultimately, selecting Trove Finance as the overall winner.
“We will be inducting all five finalists into Ecobank’s Fintech Fellowship, during which they will receive mentoring and networking support, can utilise our Banking Sandbox to access our APIs to further develop their propositions, and could potentially partner with Ecobank to roll it out across our 33-country footprint. The Ecobank Fintech Challenge furthers our vision of treating fintechs as potential commercial partners with whom we can engage to provide innovative solutions to our customers,” he said.
