• Ukheshe has announced a new partnership with Kenyan bank Diamond Trust Bank.
• The fintech firm and financial institution hope to challenge the dominance of mobile money solutions in the region.
• To do this the pair plan on leveraging a wide range of tech to offer convenient and feature-rich products.

Traditional banking isn’t all that popular on the African continent with cash or mobile money alternatives often being preferred by citizens.

Data from Ppro reveals that 46 percent of the population of the Middle East and Africa (a grouping we will never understand given the vast differences between these markets) is banked compared to a 67 percent average globally.

Fintech firm Ukheshe wants to change this through a new partnership with Diamond Trust Bank (DTB) in Kenya. Together the pair hope to provide an innovative banking-as-a-service platform for citizens in East Africa.

“Ukheshe had been looking for a banking partner in the region, and when we met with DTB to explore these opportunities, several synergies immediately came to light. When I first met Jamie, the COO of DTB, he said, ‘We are striving to be a technology company with a banking licence’. I knew then that we had the technology and DTB had the licence. We’re extremely excited to enable DTB to launch some innovative endeavours within the East African market,” says president of Business Development at Ukheshe Africa, Mark Dankworth.

The challenge for the pair is going to be the mobile money solutions offered by players in the region.

Not only are these well entrenched, users understand them and changing user behaviour is easier said than done. To that end, Ukheshe looks like it will be leveraging its Eclipse API which should help to make the user experience far better.

The API will be used to develop wallets-as-a-service on the Astra platform which DTB will launch in Kenya with expansions into Uganda and Tanzania on the cards for next year.

These technologies will enable fintechs, edtechs and other tech entities in these regions to work freely with a sponsoring bank, facilitate regulatory approval, and have access to multiple payment products through an API orchestration layer. These products may include wallets and a wallet management system, QR payments, payment services, SME solutions, SoftPOS, digital KYC, Virtual and Physical Cards, among other curated digital financial services

From the looks of it, Ukheshe and DTB are looking to take on mobile money solutions by offering a full-service solution that has multiple applications.

“The partnership is a collaborative way for both DTB and Ukheshe to achieve our organisational strategic goals from a customer acquisition, value packaging, support, and management perspective. DTB will leverage Ukheshe’s technology to drive innovation, improve financial services distribution, and offer services to its customers, while Ukheshe will leverage the bank’s position to be able to operate within the market,” explains chief operating officer at DTB, Jamie Loden.

This looks to be a good, symbiotic partnership. Whether Ukheshe and DTB will be able to make an impact on a market that looks rather set in its ways will be interesting to see.

Should the pair be successful, however, that could pave the way for more fintech innovation on the continent and that in and of itself is rather exciting.