Côte d’Ivoire’s capital city, Abidjan, has emerged as a FinTech springboard for Francophone Africa in recent years, offering companies looking to expand in French-speaking countries an ideal alternative to Lagos, Nigeria. Home to a string of popular FinTech unicorns and pan-African payment giants like Flutterwave, Interswitch and OPay, Nigeria’s tech startups often steal the headlines. However, the budding financial technology in Côte d’Ivoire is an indication that Nigeria is not the only country in West Africa driving FinTech growth and development in the region.
Abidjan-based payment solution provider Bizao has successfully expanded its footprint into other Francophone West African countries, including Mali, Burkina Faso, Togo, Senegal, and Gabon. The firm has also laid down roots in the French-speaking, or at least French-leaning, parts of Central and North Africa, establishing a presence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, and Tunisia. With an impressive technology stack that connects mobile money services and bank networks, the Bizao platform enables merchants to process a variety of payments and customers to easily transfer funds across borders via unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) or bank account. West Africa in general is a region where mobile telecommunications infrastructure has flourished while bank account ownership remains low.