TANZANIA – NMB Bank, a commercial bank, will work with Financial Technology (Fintech) firms and individuals to come up with products that will benefit late-stage startup companies.

The bank piloted a new Fintech initiative-programme through an information session that was conducted in collaboration with Smart Lab.

Smart Lab is a locally grown innovation and acceleration lab. Fintech refers to software and other modern technologies used by businesses that provide automated and improved financial services.

Fintech seeks to serve tech-savvy customers who expect money transfer, lending, loan management and investing to services that are conducted effortlessly, securely and that they must also be scalable and without the assistance of a person or the visit of a bank.

“This programme will be a great addition and will endorse our existence as a bank of acquiring knowledge and interaction together with answering our cause for driving financial inclusion through the achieved solutions,” said NMB Bank’s innovation hub senior specialist Paul Shilla at the information session in Dar es Salaam.

The new programme aims at enabling Fintech startups, developers, IT/Computer Science students, innovators and entrepreneurs to prototype, test, and build fin-tech products and services using the NMB Bank’s infrastructure.

He told the 50 participants – taken from Fin-tech startups, developers, IT/Computer Science students, innovators and entrepreneur.

The bank believes that newly introduced products and services have the potential to drive financial inclusion to markets they are serving as well as building exposure and opening doors to meeting different people from different sectors.

“Anyone who is an entrepreneur, application developers, Startup companies, Fintech and IT companies with potential financial products and solutions are all urged to apply through the NMB portal bit.ly/NMBFINTECH as long as they are past idea stages and have prototypes, financial element and are looking for a bank partner to help them scale up,” he said.

Smart Codes chief executive officer, Edwin Bruno, said the programme would be a boost to the Fintech industry.

Fintech seeks to serve tech-savvy customers who expect money transfers, lending, loans management and investing services that are conducted effortlessly and securely.