AUC VLab Teams Up With Temenos To Accelerate Fintech In Egypt
"The emerging fintech space in Egypt has the potential to transform the industry and expand access to financial services in one of the largest regional markets," says AUC VLab's Director Ayman Ismail.
The region's leading university-based startup accelerator, American University in Cairo's Venture Lab (AUC Lab), has just teamed up with the Swiss banking software company, Temenos, aiming at strengthening and speeding up the process of fintech innovation in Cairo's ecosystem.
"The emerging fintech space in Egypt has the potential to transform the industry and expand access to financial services in one of the largest regional markets," says AUC VLab's Director Ayman Ismail. Temenos will support financial innovation in Egypt by providing startups with access to the world's number one core banking solution to be used as their development environment. "The Egyptian market is currently in an ideal position to take advantage of a rich fintech ecosystem that will help drive digital transformation across the banking industry," says Jean-Paul Mergeai, Regional Director of Temenos. "Innovation is part of our DNA and the Temenos MarketPlace was founded on the notion of bringing together banks and fintechs in a win-win situation," he adds.
AUC VLab understands the technological challenges that fintech startups face. Ismail believes that this partnership responds to this challenge by offering startups an exclusive opportunity to build their products on the Temenos platform and to accelerate their development cycle. Temenos promises to provide a sandbox service to the startups utilising the accelerator. This sandbox, a non-production cloud-based version of the best-selling Temenos T24 core banking system, will enable startups to integrate their solutions with banking data and functionality as well as to test them for scalability and robustness. It will also allow them to plug into the 11 major financial institutions in Egypt already running Temenos T24. "This contributes to faster rollout of new innovative products and services to the Egyptian market," Ismail elaborates.
AUC VLab will host Temenos events, such as the upcoming "Meet the Marketplace" this October. Global fintechs at Temenos Marketplace will be invited to showcase and demonstrate their solutions to a number of Egyptian financial institutions. These fintechs will demonstrate solutions catering to opportunities and challenges relevant to the Egyptian market; such as financial inclusion and literacy, digital engagement, security, risk and compliance.
"I am optimistic that our partnership with AUC VLab will continue to foster the spirit of innovation in Egypt and help to pave the way for fintech startups for years to come," concludes Megeai.
Main Image: AUC VLab's Director Ayman Ismail. C
Courtesy of #Mo4Productions.
Photographer: Sherif Abdel-Azim.
