Cape Town based startup ThisIsMe won the Innovation Award and investor challenge set by RCS at the second edition of the international tech conference, Africa Arena.
RCS is wholly owned by the BNP Paribas Group, one of the largest banks in Europe (BNP Paribas Personal Finance South Africa, trades as RCS). ThisIsMe will partner with RCS to explore how best to ease customer onboarding and transaction approvals using ThisIsMe’s fully digitised KYC and onboarding solution.
AfricArena aims to showcase Africa’s best startups and innovators to local and international investors through a series of challenges and live pitches.
“With over $2-million in deals being done, startup-corporate partnerships being struck and a wave of energy and innovation from African entrepreneurs, we could not be more excited about the future,” says AfricArena CEO Christophe Viarnaud.
There were 11 innovation challenges altogether from a wide range of industries including; energy, health, agriculture, fintech and regtech. The RCS challenge looked for innovative customer identity verification solutions and stated: “The system will enhance the current authentication process, but also allow RCS to fully digitise onboarding and customer engagement processes in a remote but secure way across all available and new channels (in-store, online and via mobile application).”
Rudi Visser; the head of innovation acceleration at RCS, comments: “We would like to congratulate ThisIsMe for winning the RCS challenge and we are very eager to start exploring ways to integrate their innovative technology and making this new partnership successful for everyone, especially our customers.”
Juan Furmie, CEO of ThisIsMe, adds: “We are very proud to have won the challenge and excited about the opportunity to work with RCS. More and more we are seeing large corporates partnering with unique and innovative startups to help them solve real-world problems, especially throughout Africa. Events like AfricArena are helping to bring the right people together in order to solve more problems and we look forward to doing that with RCS.”