Nigeria’s Trove Finance wins Ecobank’s $15k Africa fintech challenge

Trove Finance, a Nigerian based shares trading app has emerged as the champion of the annual Ecobank Fintech Challenge involving over 890 entrants from 44 countries to receive the highly coveted $15,000 prize money as well as being inducted into the Ecobank Fintech Challenge Fellowship (EFCF) programme.

EFCF is a flagship event of the Ecobank Group, a leading Pan-African banking group, to support and spur to action early-stage fintech from across the African continent. The virtual grand finale was streamed live from Accra in Ghana and saw each of the five finalists pitching to the tech-savvy jury.

Finalists of this year’s edition emerged from a hotly contested competition where the first position receives the $15,000 prize money, while the second and third positions get $12,000 and $10,000 respectively.

The Nigerian-based Trove Finance, founded by OluwaSolanke, is a platform that enables individuals as well as institutions to buy, sell and trade any publicly traded equity, bond or exchange-traded fund across the US, Chinese, Nigerian or other global stock markets, with as little as 1,000 Naira or about $2.

The tech platform has plugged a gap by providing an easy-to-use digital investment platform that is widening investment participation and inclusion by providing a secure and cost-effective alternative to the current paper-based investment process which is largely provided by brokers charging exorbitant fees.

Ade Ayeyemi, chief executive officer, Ecobank Group, while congratulating the finalists, said “The array of fintech services and solutions entered in this year’s edition was of such a high standard that the jury faced a really difficult task whittling the hundreds of entrants down to the final five and, ultimately, selecting Trove Finance as the overall winner.

“We will be inducting all five finalists into Ecobank’s

Fintech Fellowship, during which they will receive mentoring and networking support, can utilise our Banking Sandbox to access our APIs to further develop their propositions, and could potentially partner with Ecobank to roll it out across our 33-country footprint. The Ecobank Fintech Challenge furthers our vision of treating fintech as potential commercial partners with whom we can engage to provide innovative solutions to our customers,” he concluded.

Expressing her honour to have emerged victorious at the 2021 and the fourth edition of the virtually held event said the win validates the huge potential of the Trove Finance app to widen asset ownership.

I applaud the Ecobank Group for bringing African fintech into the limelight through this competition and for providing us with continued support through its Fellowship programme. The opportunity to partner with Ecobank and roll out our app across 33 sub-Saharan African countries would provide the icing on the cake by massively accelerating