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Local innovation to be major focus of AITEC Banking & Mobile Money Conference

By Aitec
Johannesburg, 16 Feb 2012

The theme of this year's AITEC Banking & Mobile Money Conference is “Showcasing the region's banking and mobile payment innovation successes”.

The conference takes place on 7-8 March 2012, at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, Nairobi, Kenya.

AITEC Banking & Mobile Money COMESA, Innovator Fast-track Theatre

The intention is to use the region's leading annual banking event as a platform to promote the region's exciting new payments innovations and technologies to the numerous industry delegates that will be attending from throughout the world.

To give the region's innovators and software developers a prominent profile at the event, AITEC has introduced two special features: An Innovator Showcase in the exhibition and an Innovator Fast-track Theatre in the conference. The Innovator Showcase will provide emerging enterprises with new innovations for the banking and payments sector with low-cost demo areas to promote their products and services to potential customers, partners and investors. And in the Innovator Fast-track Theatre they will be given an opportunity to make product presentations to attract further interest.

Announcing these special features at the event, Sean Moroney, Chairman of AITEC Africa, emphasised the importance of nurturing and promoting the region's emerging ICT innovators. “We have a unique opportunity to build on the hype of the M-PESA success story to develop a world-class payments innovation industry in East Africa, and AITEC is fully behind this growing specialised industry, which have the potential to give us a real edge in the world market. This is why we are sponsoring the NaiPay industry association initiative to promote co-operation, high standards and wider knowledge in the industry, as well as using our annual Banking & Mobile Money Conference to promote emerging enterprises in this space.”

The Showcase and the Fast-track Theatre will be organised in partnership with NaiPay, mLab, iHub, Digital Age Institute and the Kenya ICT Board.

The conference programme also has valuable content to offer the region's emerging enterprises in the sector. A keynote presentation by Alexander Oswald, form Marketing Director of Nokia, will advise enterprises how to “Develop, monetise and protect the region's payment innovations”. Two experts in enterprise funding will provide detailed advice on business development. Michael Murai, Senior Investment Officer at Accion in the US, will make a presentation on “Investing in the mobile unbanked” and Sean Smith, New Investment Manager at Invested Development an Kenya, will make a presentation on “How to approach early stage investors and angels”.

The conference will also include a specialised session on innovation under the auspices of Grameen Foundation and Gates Foundation.

For the full conference programme of presentations, workshops and masterclasses by over 70 international and local industry experts and to register as a delegate, log on to www.aitecafrica.com.

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