South African startup and EFT payment gateway, i-Pay, has been invited by the Finnish Ambassador in South Africa to attend the world’s largest tech gathering in Helsinki during Noember 2016.
The invitation to the event is part of i-Pay being awarded the Tekes Award at the recent Ventureburn Pitching Den at the Innovation Summit which took place in Johannesburg during September. Various business solutions were evaluated according to multiple criteria with the winner and runner up’s determined through the calculation of a weighted average score.
According to the Finnish Embassy and the Innovation Summit, i-Pay particularly stood out for the quality of the business model and the scalability of the idea in the European market.
The event i-Pay is due to attend in Helsinki is called Slush 2016, which is sponsored by Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Tekes works with the top innovative companies and research units in Finland. Slush is an opportunity for i-Pay to obtain exposure and participate in the leading startup event in Europe, opening avenues to not only the Finnish market, but Europe and the rest of the world too.
Thomas Pays, co-founder of i-Pay, says he is honoured that they have been chosen to attend Slush 2016. The event is one of the leading global technology events, which is expected to bring together 15 000 attendees, 1 700 startups, 800 investors and 630 journalists between 30 November and 1 December 2016.
“We are really excited to interact and network with other industry leaders from across the world,” says Pays, “A special invite from the Finnish Ambassador is recognition of the mark i-Pay has made on the fintech industry in South Africa.”