AppZone Announces $10 Million Series A Toward Finance Digitization

Pan-African software provider AppZone has announced the closure of a $10 million Series A round, a press release said on Monday (April 12).

CardinalStone Capital Advisers has led the round, along with participation from V8 Capital, Lateral Investment Partners, Constant Capital, and Itanna Capital Ventures, the release said.

The new round will help “build out a financial operating system intended to completely digitise and automate the delivery of financial services on the continent.”

AppZone was launched in 2008 and works on products for digital core banking and interbank transactions. It comes at a time when FinTechs are dealing with telco companies and big tech players, and AppZone allows those companies the opportunities to deal with threats like legacy cost structures and a major lack of operational efficiency.

Because of an absence of high-quality localized solutions addressing the issues, traditional banks in the country were limited to using foreign technology for Western markets, which are often plagued with counterintuitive efforts like prohibitive pricing, insufficient flexibility to innovate and a lack of local tech support.

Obi Emetarom, co-founder and CEO of AppZone, said the news would help the company scale AppZone’s “products and services rapidly.”

“For the last 12 years, we’ve worked in stealth mode, building the really complex infrastructure to power the continent’s growing digital financial services space and forging partnerships with the continent’s biggest financial institutions,” he said, according to the release.

“We are seeking out gifted and audacious engineering and entrepreneurial minds, hungry to accelerate economic prosperity and tackle challenging technology with us,” he added. “We are not just trying to bring African FinTech on par with the rest of the world — we exist to make our financial sector the most innovative and technologically advanced on the globe through solutions built for Africa by Africans.”

Nigeria long saw customers devoted to cash because of its known, trusted qualities. But the pandemic might change that, as transactions got more difficult as companies closed their doors. Merchants began to take noncash pay more often due to that as well.