Visa International has built a new Innovation Studio in Nairobi, Kenya.
Dr. Patrick Njoroge, Governor of the Central Bank of Kenya, formally launched the studio on April 6 at a ceremony attended by top banks, financial technology businesses, and innovation professionals from around Sub-Saharan Africa.
This facility will serve Sub-Saharan Africa and will be part of Visa’s network of innovation centers, which have been operating since 2016 in locations such as London, Dubai, and Singapore. The Nairobi studio is the first in Africa and the sixth in the world.
The new location demonstrates Visa’s commitment to fostering innovation and providing opportunities for clients and fintech partners to collaborate on market-relevant payment and commerce solutions throughout the region.
According to Aida Diarra, Senior Vice President and Head of Visa in Sub-Saharan Africa, the studio will help to grow the Visa business in the area by providing digital and physical Visa to its customers.
“Sub-Saharan Africa is a fast-growing market with a tech-savvy population, and as we continue to promote digital payments acceptance in the region, our objective is to extend our engagement with customers and partners in building solutions tailored to Africa’s specific requirements,” Diarra added.
“Visa, as a brand focused on technology, has fostered key technical developments that have made electronic payments what they are today.” We are certain that the innovation studio will carry on that history and solidify Sub-Saharan Africa’s status as a pioneer in developing out-of-the-box solutions to our region’s most critical concerns.”
Visa has already leveraged its current innovation centers to build products for the African market, such as a cooperation with Nigerian Fintech Paga to develop new merchant acceptance solutions based on QR codes and NFC technology.
Last year, Visa teamed with Safaricom, Kenya’s biggest telecom, to connect M-24 Pesa’s million customers and 173,000 local merchants to Visa’s 61 million merchants and more than 3 billion cards.
Across Africa, local and multinational firms, as well as governments, have established innovation centers in order to collaborate on new products and stay globally competitive.
Microsoft opened a new office in Lagos this month for its African Development Center, which will house the company’s product engineering, ecosystem development, and innovation teams. Huawei also announced plans to create an innovation and research center in Tunisia in 2021.
In Kenya, corporations such as Cisco and Philips have comparable innovation studios in Nairobi, while the Kenyan government is constructing Konza City, a technology city, to foster innovation in the nation.
The establishment of Visa’s first African innovation studio, among other initiatives, will benefit the African digital ecosystem by encouraging the generation, development, and implementation of unique ideas.
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