Visa has opened its first African innovation centre in Kenya, with the goal of accelerating product development across Africa. Visa’s internal and external clients, developers, and other partners will be able to use the hub to create new payment and commerce solutions. Dubai, London, Miami, San Francisco, and Singapore are the company’s other five worldwide digital payment centres.
Visa, the global digital payments company, has inaugurated its first innovation studio in Africa and it is sixth internationally, after locations in Dubai, London, Miami, San Francisco, and Singapore. To co-create payment and commerce solutions, the studio will bring together developers, Visa’s internal and external clients, and other partners.
“Sub-Saharan Africa is a rapidly developing continent with a technologically advanced populace. Aida Diarra, senior vice president and head of Visa in Sub-Saharan Africa, stated, “As we continue to promote digital payments acceptance in the area, our objective is to strengthen our engagement with customers and partners in building solutions that are geared around the particular needs of Africa.”
“As a technology-driven brand, Visa has pushed key technological developments that have made electronic payments what they are today.” “We are convinced that the innovation studio will build on that tradition and solidify Sub-Saharan Africa’s status as a pioneer in developing out-of-the-box solutions to address our region’s most critical concerns,” Diarra added.
Visa has already leveraged its current innovation hubs to build products for the African market, such as a partnership with Nigerian Fintech Paga to develop new merchant acceptance solutions based on QR codes and NFC technology. A recent relationship with Kenya’s Safaricom, which allows the telco’s 150,000 mobile money (M-Pesa) merchants to accept card payments, was also nurtured in Visa’s other innovation laboratories. Local and multinational firms, as well as governments, are launching such innovation centers across Africa as a method of producing new products through collaborations and remaining globally competitive.
Similar laboratories are established by companies like Cisco and Philips in Nairobi, and the Kenyan government is creating a technology metropolis called Konza City to foster innovation in the country. Meanwhile, other innovation centers have sprouted in Nigeria, Africa’s startup capital, with a concentration on Lagos, the country’s cultural and commercial core and home to the continent’s greats such as tech-jobs network Andela, payments business Flutterwave, and e-commerce platform Jumia.
