By Gitahi Ngunyi
Kenya’s biggest banking group by market capitalisation, Equity Group Holdings Plc has today launched its youngest subsidiary, Finserve that will have operations in fintech space in East and Central Africa.
Finserve will have separate operations and board and will have a client-supplier relationship with Equity Group banking subsidiaries according to the banking group’s CEO Dr James Mwangi.
The newly launched fintech firm used the event to launch two new solutions under the Jenga brand.
Jenga Gateway is a platform that integrates the competing ecommerce payment solution in East and Central Africa,comprising credit and debit cards,mobile money transfers as online payment platforms such as AliPay and WeChat.
Jenga API on the other hand is an interface allow users to develop their own àpplications and solutiond riding on Finserve capabilities.
Finserve managing director Jack Ngare outlined the firm’s roadmap which will include driving ecommerce transactions in the region.
“Our clients such as online shopping giant Kilimall are using Jenga Gateway to collect payments from shoppers and pay its suppliers while Jungle Nuts has Jenga API to develop an application through it pays farmers for farm produce supply,” said.
Equity Group CEO said the launch was aimed at setting Finserve free to support other businesses including Equity Bank competitors to digitise their operations.
“We have remained profit in spite of the interest rate capping because of our digital capacity. We have packed all that capacity into a package called Finserve which we have released to the market to help other businesses reap the fintech benefits,” said Mwangi.
Mwangi said Equity Group was hoping to create 3 million new jobs and support over 750,000 businesses over time after launching Finserve.
“What we have seen from Equity Group’s experience is that after we disrupted our operations through digitisation, our customers have moved to digitising their money. For example, there are more deposit transactions with our agencies than withdrawals. This means that there is immense capacity for a thriving ecommerce industry,” he said.
Finserve is the Equity Group subsidiary that runs the four year old Equitel brand which has wrestled 20 percent of mobile commerce becoming the second biggest money transfer platform after Safaricom.
