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ThriveAgric Emerges 2022 Global Winner of Visa Everywhere Initiative
Thrive Agric, a fintech providing smallholder farmers access to finance, insights and distribution was crowned 2022 winner of the Visa Everywhere Initiative (VEI) – a global open innovation program and competition for start-ups and fintech companies. Thrive Agric is also the winner of the Visa Direct award for its role in shaping the future of money movement in Nigeria.
Taking place in Qatar alongside the FIFA World Cup 2022™, the global finale was preceded by a year-long competition that saw more than 4,000 entrepreneurs across the world entering innovative ideas to solve the payment challenges of tomorrow.
In addition to the overall winner, the following prizes were awarded:
- 2nd place: Zeti, a fintech enabling pay per use financing of sustainable transport.
- 3rd place and Audience Favourite: Huli, a platform that connects patients, doctors, and other healthcare services.
“This year, more than 4,000 fintechs participated in the global Visa Everywhere Initiative, including a record 1,130 applications from Central Europe, Middle East and Africa,” said Andrew Torre, Regional President for CEMEA, Visa.
“A new fintech generation is transforming the way consumers and businesses make payments, making it easier for more people to access and move money when they need it. We congratulate Ayo and all the winners in this year’s competition, and we look forward to continue partnering with fintechs to solve the payments challenges of tomorrow”.
Ruben Salazar, Senior Vice President and global head of Visa Direct, said: “As we strive to create more ways for people, SMBs, and larger businesses to participate in the global economy, the VEI competition provides a unique insight on how fintech are helping shape the future of money movement and expanding access to underserved markets and regions. Today’s Visa Direct Award winner will have access to modern tools and teams that help enable global money movement to billions of endpoints worldwide¹.”
The event brought together Visa and industry thought leaders and a previous Visa Everywhere Initiative winner to celebrate the innovative fintechs and their solutions. Wade Arnold, founder and CEO of Moov Financial and 2021 Visa Everywhere Initiative North America and Global winner returned as a judge, with special guest Visa’s Dr. Saeeda Jaffar hosting a fireside chat with football legend Marcel Desailly.
Ayo Arikawe, Co-Founder of ThriveAgric and now winner of both the global and the CEMEA competitions, delivered his pitch on how his sfintech is enabling strategic partnerships with financial institutions and agriculture value chain players to provide smallholders with financial services, agriculture inputs, extension, market linkage, e-commerce, and payment services.
“As a central part of the Nigerian economy, agriculture is the livelihood and main source of income for many of our people. The hard work we’ve put into ThriveAgric will ensure that technology is leveraged to empower farmers across the country. To not only win the CEMEA regional VEI competition but also pitch at the final here in Qatar gives me great confidence in our ability to scale our solutions and continue to enrich farmers’ lives,” said Ayo Arikawe.
About the finalists of the Visa Everywhere Initiative
Ayo Arikawe of Thrive Agric (Central Europe, Middle East and Africa) – Providing small holder farmers access to finance, insight and distribution.
Ayo co-founded Thrive Agric a platform that connects farmers to finance, best practices and market. Since launching in June 2017 they have worked with over 250,000 farmers across 23 states in Nigeria.
Thrive also opens up its platform to financial service providers, insurers, lenders which allows them to access data from the farmers and share value among each other.
Thrive’s farmers grow 7% of the maize consumed in Nigeria. Ayo is an Alumni of Ycombinator and Google Launchpad. He was Top 10 in Jack Ma African Netpreneur Prize and a YTech 100 recipient by the Future Awards Africa.
Mriganka Pattnaik of Mriganka Pattnaik of Merkle Science (Asia Pacific) – Merkle Science is the next generation predictive Web3 risk & intelligence platform
Merkle Science is the next generation Web3 risk mitigation, compliance and forensics platform.
They work with crypto and DeFi businesses, blockchain bridges, NFT players, retailers, financial institutions, insurers and government agencies around the globe.
Their focus on multi-chain and liquidity pool analysis, real-time transaction monitoring and predictive and machine learning-driven analytics provides our clients with best-in-class solutions and enables Web3’s safe and healthy growth.
Dan Saunders of Zeti (Europe) – Fintech enabling pay per use financing of sustainable transport
Zeti helps organisations adopt zero emission vehicles (ZEVs) by making it as simple, easy and transparent as paying for a utility. Powered by real-time data, Zeti’s software improves the financial viability of ZEVs for organisations, generates attractive returns for financiers, and helps manufacturers to sell their vehicles.
Christine De Wendel of Sunday (North America) – The fastest digital payment for restaurants and the industry’s future
Christine de Wendel is co-founder and CEO NOAM of Sunday. Prior to this, she was Chief Operating Officer of ManoMano, one of France’s fastest growing tech companies and Europe’s leading online platform for home improvement.
Before joining ManoMano, Christine spent seven years at Zalando, Europe’s largest online fashion retailer, where she built up Zalando’s French business. Christine is passionate about the European tech industry and has become an expert in scaling start-ups. Christine holds a BSc in International Affairs from Georgetown University, an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and an MBA from INSEAD.
Alejandro Vega of Huli (Latin America) – Platform that connects patients, doctors and other healthcare services
Alejandro Vega is the CEO of Huli, a Latin American digital healthcare startup. Before founding Huli, Alejandro worked in investment banking where he worked on several cross-border M&A deals.
He also worked in General Electric, where he graduated from the Operations Management Leadership Program. Alejandro is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained an MBA from the Wharton School.
He is a Fellow of the Lauder Institute Global MBA program and an alumnus of the Portuguese international program. He graduated Summa Cum Laude as an Industrial Engineer from Louisiana State University.
Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offenses Commission (ICPC), has revealed that none of the Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs), in the country complied fully with ethical standards, policies, and anti-corruption measures in the passing year.
This was following the findings from the Commission’s Ethics and Integrity Compliance Scorecard (EICS) for the MDAs.
The Commission warned that henceforth, non-compliant MDAs will face necessary actions, including enforcement, to ensure adherence to government directives.
According to the EICS scorecard released on Thursday in Abuja by Demola Bakare, ICPC spokesperson, no MDA out of 330 MDAs that were assessed through physical deployment by ICPC teams achieved full compliance.
The EICS serves as a preventive tool used to assess and enhance the compliance of MDAs with ethical standards, policies, and anti-corruption measures.
Findings from the report indicated that no MDA achieved full compliance, while 29.55 per cent of MDAs captured attained substantial compliance, and 51.62 per cent had partial compliance.
The report also observed that 15.91 per cent showed poor compliance, while 292 per cent were non-compliant.
According to the report, common gaps included a lack of whistle-blower policies, strategic plans, and effective stock verification units, adding that many MDAs failed to conduct any forms of system studies or render financial and audit reports.
Commenting on the report, Bakare noted: “This year, 2024, the tool covered 323 responsive MDAs, with 15 MDAs non-responsive and categorised as high corruption risk.
“It is imperative to inform you that this initiative has yielded some positive and value-driven impacts, and these are, but not limited to, increased awareness and compliance with anti-corruption measures, enhanced competition among MDAs to meet criteria, and improved procurement processes and data reliability.
“The Commission recognises the MDAs with substantial compliance and will continue deploying these tools to promote integrity and accountability.
“Non-compliant MDAs will face necessary actions, including enforcement, to ensure adherence to government directives. We are certain that these efforts will continue to underline ICPC’s dedication to enhancing good governance and preventing corruption.”
Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals (DPRP) has dismissed claims that the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) used a $1 billion loan secured through a crude forward sale agreement to support the refinery during a liquidity crisis.
In a statement on Wednesday, Anthony Chiejina, company’s chief branding and communications officer, said the NNPCL’s stance was a distortion of the facts.
“We would like to clarify that this is a misrepresentation of the situation as $1bn is just about 5% of the investment that went into building the Dangote Refinery,” Chiejina said.
Chiejina stated that the refinery’s decision to enter into a partnership with the NNPCL was based on the recognition of “their strategic position in the industry as the largest offtaker of Nigerian crude” and at the time, the sole supplier of petrol into Nigeria.
“We agreed on the sale of a 20% stake at a value of $2.76 billion. Of this, we agreed that they will only pay $1 billion while the balance will be recovered over a period of 5 years through deductions on crude oil that they supply to us and from dividends due to them,” Chiejina said.
“If we were struggling with liquidity challenges we wouldn’t have given them such generous payment terms. As at 2021 when the agreement was signed, the refinery was at the pre-commission stage.”
According to the statement, the agreement would have been cash-based rather than credit-driven if the refinery struggled with liquidity issues.
The refinery’s spokesman said the NNPCL was subsequently unable to supply the agreed 300,000 barrels a day of crude (bpd).
He stated that the shortfall was because the NNPPC “had committed a greater part of their crude cargoes to financiers with the expectation of higher production which they were unable to achieve”.
“We subsequently gave them a 12-month period for them to pay cash for the balance of their equity given their inability to supply the agreed crude oil volume,” he said.
“NNPCL failed to meet this deadline which expired on June 30th 2024. As a result, their equity share was revised down to 7.24%. These events have been widely reported by both parties,” he said.
9mobile has apologized for the recent service outages experienced by its valued customers which has affected their ability to provide voice, data, internet services. “We understand the frustration these disruptions have caused and deeply regret the inconvenience.
“Our technical team has identified the root causes of the outages including a fire incident at our Main Data Centre in Lagos last night which severely impacted services especially in the Lagos and South-West. We are grateful for the swift intervention of the Lagos State Fire Service, which helped prevent further damage.
“Prior to the fire incident, our network experienced major fibre interruptions leading to varying degrees of outages. We had a fibre cut on the backbone links in Lagos which led to a total data outage across the country.
“This was followed closely by two vandalism incidents in Lagos and Abuja, leading to total service outage in South-West and data service outage in the North. Services have now been fully restored in the North & South-South States while restorations work is ongoing in others. We expect to fully restore services as soon as possible”
At 9mobile, customer satisfaction is remains top priority. “We value the trust you place in us and appreciate your patience and understanding during this challenging time. Customers who continue to experience issues can reach out to our customer service team via our social media touchpoints or our experience centres”.
Once again, we sincerely apologize for the disruption and thank you for your continued support.
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