 Good morning, I don't think it's often that you find African women who don't look like her young white men in tight trousers Coming to talk to you about technology, but it is an honor to be here and thank you I'm the co-founder of a vamble solutions Inc This company was created by myself and my business partner Marvin Cole to solve the problem of Africans not having access to SME finance and in so doing and dealing with this issue We found deeper greater problems that created some of the most amazing opportunities in what we like to call the Invisible trillion euro market Africa is a huge place But it's kind of a lonely place as it relates to financial services Products services are not created and not many people want to come to where we are to help us to solve these problems There's plenty of space a big demographic area Lots of tools required and lots of tools to play with but not many people to join us in what we're doing But we're here today because we'd like to tell you that it's about time you came to join us The African continent is a huge space as I've mentioned before and not many people really understand just how big it is But how often do you hear about companies who will say they have global? Exposure they have global presence yet. They don't have anything on the African continent at all Or you'll hear about a company that says oh We are in Africa, but we're only in Kenya or our headquarters for Africa are based in Leeds You would never see a company with an Indian headquarters or Indian operations and say that they're in Dusseldorf But for the African realities this happens to us all the time and then when you don't come and play in our sandbox with Us in Africa you wonder why you lost your money It's because you decided to sit somewhere else and dine with us with a long teaspoon And that's just not how it works for us and we want you to know that and that's why we're here Now some of the statistics about Africa are completely misunderstood starting with the fact that our continent is huge You can fit the United States and a number of other places in here But yet the globe has been written in such a way that you don't get to see this We also have 1.1 billion people right now on the continent but by 2014 There's going to be 2.5 million people with 40% of them under the age of 40 Which means that the addressable market and the head count for those individuals that make up the largest portion of our Employment is going to be massive But the thing about our continent is there are not that many governments that are providing us with any kind of benefits So that 40% under 40 are going to be the entrepreneurs and the business owners And that's the market that a vomit gets to address with nobody else playing with us in our sandpit But what really gets me and I know full well that there are VCs here at slush right now is of all the Capital that you guys decided to collect and deploy in 2016 0.3% Came into the African continent and you are all very familiar with the fact that we are the kings and queens of Leapfrog technology yet you leapfrogged over us as it relates to you putting your money where your mouth is I Hold that in 2018 that that's going to change But it's a pitifully small amount considering the huge needs and the demands that we have So in democratizing finance, which is why we exist We're here to tell you that there is an extraordinary Revolution going on and it is a brand new day and we're so excited about what we've done democratizing finance for all means that we create evolutionary processes so that everybody who needs capital to grow their Companies has access to that right now. I can't begin to tell you of the almost 1700 transaction across our platform There are only about I would say one in six who have ever had a loan from a bank before they came to us There's a very very small number We are going to tell you about the operating system and the natural language chatbots that we've created and the risk Algorithms that we've created that embed natural language and ethnic and cultural data about Africans that most westerners do not understand And that is how we democratize Finance we've created something by people for people that's got nothing to do with banking But everything to do with the velocity of capital using tech Now when you create technology for Africans it gets really sticky very quickly We didn't actually have landlines We went straight from nothing to cell phones the things that we do on cell phones the way we transmit capital remittances by services by bills in comparison the American market is a lot slower than us But the sad thing is we are often held to the standards of the American market when it comes to measuring what is successful in technology And it just doesn't quite apply in the same way if you judge a fish by how well it climbs a tree the fish is a loser But we are really doing something on this continent and when it comes to using technology to solve a problem There are so many examples, and I really do encourage you to take a look at some of those Right now African mobile payments are already 25% and rising above coming after American adoptions And that's the platform that we've used for delivering our services. We are truly mobile forward the underserved portion of Africa accounts for almost 365 million dollars in credit gap and that number apparently is under counted because there aren't many statistics where we are One of the problems that we're solving is creating the databases for measuring risk There is no credit bureau in many parts of Africa So we've had to use things to use information to create data But one of the only companies that know full well that if a certain type of tribe comes and applies on our platform And they've got more than one or two wives that you have to underwrite their risk Distantly because one house is legal the other is not Nobody knows how to do that except us or the 400 million Muslims who are on serve because they cannot ethically go into a bank But Avambas the only Sharia certified fintech platform in Africa today 75% of the Africans on the continent lack access to formal banking services because banking services will not create products for them Now in democratizing you need a language to share and standards that you both believe in 2000 different languages in Cameroon alone. We have 262 different tribes with separate languages We partnered with Microsoft earlier this year to create a natural language chatbot This means that anybody who does not speak a colonial language Does not have to go into the bank and feel embarrassed that they don't understand the forms because they're not formally educated But they can pick up a phone in their own language and our chatbot will respond in Kikuyu By for family K. Ebo Yoruba you name it and they will finally get the services that they need to stop being a startup mode for 20 years To succeed in a zoo as well as we have you need to do a number of things really well Consistently and if you partner with Avambas or any other African tech company These are the things that you need to be doing all the time really really well The benchmark for Africans is much higher than the rest of the world We've had a long road to get here, but we're moving at great great speed Our cultures are different even in business deep local knowledge Truly necessary it goes without saying the same would go if you were trying to do business in Finland or Denmark or anywhere in the Nordic region You have to create your processes for where people are Even though they are very sticky and they take up a technology very quickly you have to be very culturally sensitive And in this new evolution that we've developed There is a brand new battlefield going on. We all know that wars have been fought for democracy Africa Unfortunately has a very sad narrative about that, but today the battlefield is technology It's the fight for the hearts and the minds of individuals to believe that futures can be written Regardless of what their governments are doing. It's about cross-border engagement It's about using technology to prevent all of the things that happen when women can't get loans or men are not able to rise above their Standards because there hasn't been the education that they require But mostly because within trade and commodities. It's all about you So in order to help these people this is the growth as a service product that we created We gave visibility to ourselves and to banks if they want to use our products and services And we have full control of the asset our investors absolutely love us because we give them Transparency control of the asset return on investment as high as 16% net of Fees and we do it all on a fully digitised platform where everybody can see what's truly going on We believe that the promise of blockchain is going to bypass all of the issues that we have with all of the natural Cross-border trade commodities and sometimes where it doesn't happen at all despite shared Currencies and what we're building for Q1 2018 is just that we want to be able to provide great transparency to international investors We're not always able to meet our goals That's because there's never enough money to chase the amount of pipeline that we have and we are always looking for more Capital and partners to innovate more technology and just to give you an example so that you know that this isn't just a great story About what we want to do. This is mr. Chassis one of my favorite customers He was in cash flow hell before we came along and because we're able to help him with acquiring his goods using e-commerce and use Airbnb style Flexible warehouses and keep a track of where he is in his trade cycles We're able to help him beat competition and order more and more Containers of the goods that he needs Africa is all about trade and that's the most act greatest activity that goes on there We are an enabler and we are a disruptor to banks It is interesting to be in both spaces at the same time But when banks don't want to join us we just say all right forget you guys We're gonna go straight to the customers and we're gonna take your share of wallet and we do it without being a bank Who are we? With four individuals that decided that the problems of Africa were not beyond us and that would were big enough for the challenge But more than anything what you guys need to remember here today This isn't your debt granddaddy's Africa things have changed women like me age 52 I'm a grandmother. We run the tech scene So you either come play with us or you go back and you rewrite your narrative on Africa I want to thank you all for listening us today This is a historic moment for a bumble and we're really excited about what we're building this ain't your granddaddy's Africa Thank you so very much