Citi announced the winners of the MENA Fintech Challenge.

Fawry, PaySky, Octet and Wipro Limited and Traydstream.The Citi MENA Fintech Challenge offered the region’s Fintech community the opportunity to put their ideas into practice and come up with innovative solutions around four identified problem statements: Digitizing Cash Collections; Assured Payments; B2B2C Enablement; Digitizing Trade Processes.

“This challenge was an important milestone for Citi. We were very impressed with the quality of the applications and proposed solutions around the problem statements. It gives me great pleasure to see the innovation and fast paced development in the Fintech space in the MENA countries and how their ecosystems evolve to further support them,”

said Emre Karter, Treasury and Trade Solutions Head, MENAPT, Citi.

“By offering the FinTech community the opportunity to showcase their ideas, we hope to contribute to the development and growth of FinTech companies in the region.’’

The winners in each category include:

1. Digitizing Cash Collections : Fawry is the leading Fintech platform based in Egypt, offering financial services to consumers and businesses in the MENA region, used by 25 million consumers, processing more than 2.5 Million transactions on a daily basis.
2. Assured Payments : Octet is a pioneering supply chain management and financing portal for both large corporations and small & medium enterprises (SMEs) based in Turkey. It aids SMEs and large corporations by shortening the cash cycle for sellers and lengthening for buyers.
3. B2B2C Enablement : PaySky is the next-generation electronic payments solutions provider, building the payments infrastructure enabling the new digital economy across Africa & the Middle East. With a Vision of “Democratizing e-payments”, PaySky empowers financial institutions, businesses and consumers remit, pay & get paid.
4. Digitizing Trade Processes: Wipro limited, a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company and Traydstream, a rapidly growing fintech with multi-cloud-enabled trade automation platform, based in London, have joined hands to enable a cloud-based trade finance automation platform. Wipro and Traydstream’s joint proposition enables a modular technology that digitizes and stores trade finance documentation, extracting the data intelligently. Based on machine learnt experience, it also validates the transaction documentation against a vast, evolvable library of Trade Rules and Compliance

In the lead up to the MENA FinTech Day, Citi reached out to over 1000 FinTechs in the region, calling for solutions that could address one or more of the four identified problem statements. An initial shortlist of 60 applicants were invited to pitch to Citi panelists in workshops held across the region in five cities: Dubai (UAE), Karachi (Pakistan), Cairo (Egypt), Amman (Jordan), and Istanbul (Turkey), before the final eight teams were chosen (two per problem statement).

Each team was paired with a Citi mentor to fine-tune their pitch and solutions before the MENA FinTech Day. As part of MENA FinTech Day, each team presented a pitch and solution demo before a Citi judging panel. Citi will work with the four winners on a proof of concept and use cases.