Minka, the Colombian real-time payment startup, is set to expand to Eastern and Southern Africa to be part of the $115 billion digital economy on the continent.
Minka plans to set up shop in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia in its first phase then expand to Mozambique, Zambia, and Malawi in Southern Africa to help bridge the gaps between banks, financial institutions, Central banks, fintechs, and clearing houses.
According to the company’s CEO Domagoj Rozic,“Our expansion into Africa is a testament to our continued mission to build more efficient payments infrastructure across the Global South. Low levels of financial inclusion, a heavy reliance on cash, and non-interoperable legacy payment systems are just a few of the issues our team in Latin America has successfully overcome and we believe it is our duty to continue creating solutions that benefit society”.
Founded in Bogota, Colombia, in 2016, Minka is a cloud-based programmable technology platform that upgrade national payment systems for the digital economy. The platform simplifies how customers and merchants interact with money and due to that it raised $24 million in capital through a funding round led by Tiger Global and Kaszek in 2022. The funds were used to modernize the clearing houses and central bank infrastructure and enable a fully self-service platform for publishing and moving money to organizations.
Minka is an open infrastructure for publishing money and is building a layer2 payments protocol used by clearinghouses, financial institutions, and fintechs to move money in real time. Currently Minka is modernizing the payments infrastructure of several countries in Latin America and is already live with 20 financial institutions then expand into Africa.
“We’re excited to bring our story and the benefits of our approach to people in Africa, where we are building impactful connections between financial institutions of all types and allowing teams to build and connect payment systems in days instead of years,” said Alexander Perko, Minka’s Growth lead.
Minka follows EBANX’s launch in 2023 in 11 African countries and Uruguay’s dLocal launch in Kenya, Rwanda and Nigeria.