O’Mari: 3 fintech lessons from an old war horse to the new generation

Not every founder has the luxury of an almost century-old business with a diversified portfolio as a launch pad. Moreover, a litany of industry-agnostic partnerships and shareholdings ensuring whatever is dreamed up has more than a fighting chance. This is what O'Mari essentially is and we know at this junction, you are probably wondering what this has to do with every aspiring founder in their bedroom as we speak dreaming to be the next big thing in Fintech.

The answer to that starts with how you are designing a product to suit a market. If you are going to be in fintech in Zimbabwe or Southern Africa for that matter, you are starting behind the eight ball, despite the reports saying that Africa's digital payments space is projected to grow by 152% between 2020 - 2025. Most of those projections are predicated on the sheer amount of funding for fintech startups that we have seen over the years, particularly in the big four markets.

The truth of the matter (or as close as anyone can get to an absolute) is that growth is optimistic at best. As it stands, reports vary but according to McKinsey, less than 10% of African transactions are digital. A harrowingly small proportion of physical money that's exchanging hands day by day.

How bad the state of digital money is something we covered when we looked at the cash moving through remittance service providers across the Zimbabwe - South Africa Corridor.