Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

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African Tech Roundup - Monica Brand Engel of Quona Capital on why impact investment gets a bad rap

Monica Brand Engel is a Peruvian American investor and entrepreneur who has been involved with a number of investment vehicles and products aimed at broadening financial inclusion. Monica spent her formative years in Silicon Valley and is a disciple of agile development and user-centered design. The financial inclusion businesses she helped launch include Quona Capital, Accion Frontier Inclusion Fund and its predecessor fund, Frontier Investments Group, Anthuri Catalysts (Cape Town venture capital accelerator), a Calvert index fund (Bethesda based socially responsible mutual fund), lending intermediaries sponsored by The Development Fund (San Francisco based) and new business lines with Compartamos (now Gentera, the largest microfinance institution in Mexico). In this chat, Monica talks to Andile Masuku about Quona's recent investment in the South African fintech startup, Yoco, and comments on some of the criticism frequently levelled at the impact investment community.
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African Tech Roundup - Allard Luchsinger of Velocity Capital Private Equity talks making sound bets on African startups

Allard Luchsinger is the Director for Private Equity at the Dutch VC firm Velocity Capital Private Equity. Allard supports all of Velocity’s portfolio companies as an active board member for TradeKing, an innovative US online brokerage firm; 8 Securities, Asia’s next-generation online broker based in Hong Kong; Five Degrees, a progressive banking software provider from The Netherlands; as well as Cellulant, a leading mobile commerce and payment technology provider from Kenya. He joined Velocity Capital in 2011, after co-founding and serving as the COO of the groundbreaking San Francisco-based online brokerage firm Zecco. At Zecco, Allard drove all operations, growing the firm’s client base to more than 250,000 accounts. In 2012, Zecco merged with competing brokerage firm TradeKing in 2012 to create the industry’s sixth largest online broker, TradeKing Group Inc. Previously, Allard served as associate partner at the Dutch strategy-consulting firm Boer & Croon, as well as co-founder and CEO of TradingCars.com, an online B2B marketplace for the trading of new passenger cars. He also co-founded Wannahaves.nl, an online lifestyle platform in the Netherlands. Allard started his career at Gemini Consulting as a strategy consultant. In this conversation, Allard chats to Andile Masuku about what motivated the team at Velocity to land their very first African investment and he comments on some of the challenges he's encountered in terms of seeking out investible prospects to fund.
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African Tech Roundup - Stephen Ozoigbo of the African Technology Foundation on plugging startup pipeline gaps

Andile catches up with Stephen Ozoigbo at the inaugural Enterprise Africa Summit that was recently hosted by the British Council in Accra, Ghana. Ozoigbo is the CEO of The African Technology Foundation. He has dedicated his energies to addressing the obvious gaps in Africa’s tech startup pipeline by championing some of the most high profile ecosystem growth initiatives on the continent— not least, by serving as Managing Partner of Lions@frica, being an key executive supporter of DEMO Africa and helping to organise the Geeks on a Plane Africa Tour which ended in April 2017.