SMEs in Egypt will soon have access to Shariah compliant digital trade financing thanks to an African fintech start-up expanding into the North African market.
Cameroon-headquartered Ovamba Solutions has partnered with another start-up, Singularity Finance, providing the latter with the rights to sell Ovamba’s Shariah compliant digital solutions to banks, microfinance institutions and other alternative providers of trade finance to SMEs in Egypt.
“With this partnership we at Singularity have been able to expand our financial ecosystem offering by adding a set of bank grade products that are tailored for our part of the world. Even more so we are empowered to start offering this tool to other banks and microfinance institutions to start rolling out their own platforms. This allows for a true disruption in how we as a country can reach financial inclusion,” Mohamed Taysir, CEO and co-founder of Singularity, explained.
The solutions comprise of BankPartner, a software-as-a-service suite of systems that uses alternative risk scoring parameters to assess and process transactions for small, medium and informal businesses who are involved in trade, importation, supply chain and manufacturing sectors. It combines e-commerce, inventory purchase services, logistics, warehousing and other end-to-end workflows. The other solution is Pamoja, designed for enterprises looking to originate and invest in trade finance deals independently. Pamoja has the same capabilities found in BankPartner and streamlines the work flows for investor and portfolio management, and financing transactions of any kind.
“Embedding Islamic finance elements into our technologies and business systems has proven to be very effective at de-risking small business finance,” shared Viola Llewelly, the co-founder and president of Ovamba. “Egypt is an important market, and Singularity is well positioned to pioneer in an era of business growth for small businesses and digital engagement for financial institutions.”
Both the companies expect to be engaging banks and serving the Egyptian market in the first quarter of 2021.