South Africa’s leading EFT payment specialist Ozow and AfricArena are challenging talented developers in South Africa to help deliver a new wave of fintech innovation leveraging on the new Ozow API, with a prize money of R100,000 in cash for the winning team.
Ozow has teamed up with AfricArena to launch a Hackathon Challenge
across South Africa. This is a unique opportunity for tech developers to come up with innovations and work with the world class team of Ozow, by providing a presentation of their idea and code using the Ozow API to demonstrate the application.
Three finalist teams will qualify and compete on AfricArena Summit, the continent premier deal flow platform, on 24 and 25 November 2020. The winning team will walk away with a cash prize of R100,000, and the two finalist teams will earn R25,000 each, subject to the terms and conditions available upon applying.
“The growth of fintech industry has been accelerating throughout the pandemic, and digitization of payments is at the forefront of the economic transformation of many businesses. Since its inception, Ozow has been an incredibly dynamic and innovative South Africa based company. Our world class tech team is putting the best tech minds of the country to the challenge with the AfricArena Ozow challenge. We are looking forward to receiving very disruptive ideas using our new Ozow API and to working with the finalist teams to continue to deliver amazing innovation to the market”
- Thomas Pays, Founder and CEO of Ozow
AfricArena Founder, Christophe Viarnaud adds, "We are very proud of partnering with the Ozow team, a challenge winner at AfricArena 2017, to work on this amazing Hackathon and engage with the brilliant tech community in South Africa for applications using Ozow technology. Ozow has been an incredible success story since its creation and has become a reference in fintech. We hope this will unlock further innovation and enable many developers across the nation to show their metal."
South African-based AfricArena, which has established itself as a leading ecosystem accelerator and deal flow platform across Africa since it launched in 2017, is anchored and endorsed by major international sponsors. These include La French Tech, Silicon Cape, United Nations, AirFrance KLM, Sanofi, Methys, City of Cape Town, Wesgro, Proparco, along with several major investment networks such as EuroQuity, SAVCA, EAVCA, AVCA and ABAN.
Startups wishing to take part in the Challenge can apply at here, applications close at 5pm on 2nd November.
About Ozow
Founded by techpreneurs Thomas Pays, Lyle Eckstein, and Mitchan Adams in 2014, Ozow has grown into a world-class digital payment platform that simplifies transactions for customers and merchants.Designed to reinvent the typically cumbersome inter-bank payment process and provide an attractive alternative to the entrenched payment solutions that have historically been available, Ozow removes the timeous manual way of doing things and significantly speeds up transaction time so merchants are able to process more orders. Unlike a traditional EFT transaction that can take up to three minutes to process, Ozow cuts the time down to 20 seconds. While traditional cash and card payments will still be here for the foreseeable future, Ozow is disrupting how online and in-store purchases are done. In a continent where mobile is king and there are concerns about having large amounts of cash on hand, the flexibility that Ozow provides both the customer and the merchant means it sets the platform for digital payments to become commonplace.