Renaissance Capital, a leading emerging and frontier markets investment bank with extensive operations in Africa, today host its inaugural Nigeria tech and fintech virtual conference.

Adesoji Solanke, Director, Equity Research Analyst, Frontier / SSA Banks & Fintech, Renaissance Capital leads the frontier and Africa-focused banks and fintech equity research team, as well as the Africa private markets tech and fintech research and investments team. Please see below highlights from his speech today.

• 2021 has been a breakout year for the Africa tech ecosystem. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve seen landmark fundraising transactions which have attracted heavyweight global venture investors such as SoftBank, Sequoia and Tiger Global, and new unicorns coming to life, with Flutterwave, OPay and Wave being some of the major ones which all happen to be in the fintech space.
• When we look at some of the data, we find that African tech companies have raised over $2.5bn YtD across over 450 deals, which is more than double what was raised in August 2020 YtD and already more than 30% above what was raised in all of 2020. This highlights the growing interest that Africa continues to receive in this environment.
• When we dissect by country, we find that Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt are the leading destinations for venture funding on the continent, which are all markets where we have offices and boots on the ground. Start-ups headquartered in these countries combined to account for close to 90% of total funds raised in Africa YtD. Nigeria tops the list with a 43% share with $952mn raised across 110+ transactions YtD, while fintech is the most active sector in Africa attracting over $1.5bn YtD which is more than double what the sector attracted all of last year. Within fintech, we find a wide range of solutions that entrepreneurs are looking to solve, which includes agency banking, digital wealth management, open banking, offline and online acquiring, digital lending, alternative credit scoring amongst many others.

So, with all this activity going on you’re probably wondering – where does Renaissance Capital fit into all off this?

• The first you should remember is that we are a 25-yr old emerging and frontier market focused investment bank leading across all our markets. We lead with transparency and knowledge and this is why our research team continues to maintain its leading rankings, which supports the innovative advisory work of our investment banking team, while facilitating capital flows across multiple countries and issuers.
• Secondly, we have decided to double down on the Africa tech and fintech space. This simply means that we will be taking our competencies focused on large corporates to support the tech ecosystem on the continent. This is why we’re having this conference today, which is the first of its kind for us, despite having already worked with leading names like Fawry, Fairmoney and GlobalAccelerex on the continent.
• We will support the ecosystem in three primary ways - Advisory, Research and Venture Investing. As we’ve always done in public markets, we will once again lead with knowledge and transparency to help reduce the friction with sourcing equity or debt capital for tech companies, driving exits, mergers and acquisitions, by connecting entrepreneurs with financiers and strategic investors around the world.  Some our research you may have come across already and there will be many more as we go on from here. On the investing side, we will be allocating capital off our own balance sheet into some of the most promising tech entrepreneurs we come across on the continent across seed to series A stages and if you want to reach us, please email africatech@rencap.com
• Finally, we have strengthened our team significantly over the past month to focus on these new initiatives, and we continue to invest in our Africa franchise as we remain firmly committed to supporting investors and founders like we’ve been doing for well over a decade in Africa. 

Once again, I welcome you to our inaugural Nigeria tech and fintech virtual conference and I hope you find the many conversations we have lined up for you today highly insightful and engaging. I look forward to staying in touch and hope you have a wonderful conference.