How AI is Reshaping African Fintech In 2025
just 'cos you 🫵 can't afford to be left behind❗❗
Hi, Dear Innovator 👋
4 days ago, the newly inaugurated president of the United States made an announcement concerning a coalition project called Stargate, involving OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank. These tech giants are putting $500 billion together to build data centers, advance AI research, and promote innovation in the field and the president’s announcement was more or less a show of the government’s support.
Last month, we’d highlighted some tech trends to pay attention to in 2025, and AI topped the list! Glad to see that it’s all coming together 🥳
To keep you updated on this particular AI trend, we’ll be doing a series on how AI is helping African tech innovations, in different sectors, to be better and prepped for a new wave of competition in the tech world.
Today, you’ll learn about:
Which Fintech innovation to focus on in 2025
Which opportunities are opening up to African tech innovators ‘cos of AI
Harnessing AI for financial inclusion and more in Africa
SCROLL TO THE BEST PART 👇
1) Financial Inclusion and Accessibility
AI is revolutionising financial inclusion in Africa, offering innovative ways to bring more people into the formal financial system. Some of these innovative ways include: AI-driven credit scoring, the use of sophisticated algorithms to predict loan repayment and risk assessment, the use of Machine learning (ML) models for behavioural analysis and customer profiling, and other adaptive products and services that evolve with users’ changing financial situation or life events, providing a more relevant financial service experience.
AI systems can evaluate creditworthiness for those previously labelled ‘unbankable’. ML models can also now identify patterns in their data, predicting loan repayment likelihood with impressive accuracy. Beyond scoring, AI is also driving the creation of personalised financial products by analysing user behaviour, transaction history, and preferences.
For Africa’s tech innovators, these developments signal opportunities to build inclusive solutions that empower communities and fuel economic growth as AI is no longer just a tool—it's a bridge to a more accessible financial future.
M-Shwari, Safaricom’s mobile-credit services, has already taken centre stage with this AI initiative. As well as Jumo, which leverages AI to tailor their financial products, particularly for microfinance and lending.
Some AI credit-scoring tool providers include: Credolab, Optasia, Axe Credit Portal (ACP) and Zest AI.
This is a good place to start if you’re looking to leverage their API or to integrate their AI credit-scoring tool into your product.
2) Fraud Detection and Security
Fraud detection has taken a leap forward with AI in 2025, offering smarter ways to prevent financial crimes. Through pattern recognition, AI analyses past fraud data to spot unusual behaviours or transaction patterns that signal potential fraud.
This isn't guesswork – it’s precision, built on learning from what’s happened before.
AI also enables real-time monitoring, keeping an eye on transactions as they occur. When something looks off, it flags or pauses the activity immediately, giving users (either individuals or African tech innovators) a chance to act before any damage is done. This instant response can be the difference between a near-miss and a financial loss.
Finally, predictive modelling goes a step further by identifying emerging fraud patterns. It forecasts potential risks, allowing businesses to prepare and counter threats before they strike. For African tech innovators, this means stronger security, reduced fraud losses, and greater trust from customers.
Some innovators are walking hand-in-hand 🤝 with AI to protect their products from fraud and they include: Flutterwave, Kuda bank, Cellulant and OnePipe.
Tools to use:
You can integrate the following AI fraud-detection tools into your fintech product: SEON, Feedzai, Fraud.net, BioCatch, and Resistant AI.
3) Real-Time Currency 🤑 Conversion with AI
Different payment platforms are using AI to provide real-time, optimised currency conversions during transactions and this is particularly important for Africa's growing cross-border trade. Instead of relying on fixed conversion rates from traditional systems, AI dynamically fetches the best rates based on live forex data, saving users money while speeding up the process
Flutterwave, for example, uses AI for optimising its currency conversion in cross-border payments. Nairametrics' NairaRates Bot also uses AI for providing real-time exchange rate information. There are also plenty of other African and global currency converters that are powered by AI to provide real-time info.
You can integrate the currency-conversion APIs of the following companies into your fintech solution:
4) Micro-Lending At Checkout
Integrated AI models now allow tech innovations to offer instant, small-scale loans during payment.
For example, a user who doesn’t have enough funds for a transaction can get a tailored micro-loan in real time, based on their payment history and creditworthiness. This innovation helps tackle affordability issues.
Kenya’s Tala leverages AI and machine learning to provide personalised financial services. By analysing user data, Tala offers instant, small-scale loans to individuals, facilitating immediate access to funds when needed, such as during checkout processes. This approach addresses affordability challenges and promotes financial inclusion.
APIs to use:
KiScore by Kaleidofin and HES FinTech
5) AI-driven Context-Aware Payments
Context-aware payments refer to payment systems that dynamically adjust to the user's current environment or situation, including network connectivity, location, device capabilities, and user preferences. For instance, systems can recognise when a payment is being made in a low-connectivity area and switch to offline transaction modes while syncing later. This innovation ensures reliability in regions where internet stability is still a challenge.
These systems can switch to offline modes where transactions are stored locally on the device and then synchronised with the central payment system once connectivity is restored. This ensures that users can make payments even in areas with poor or no internet service.
While the concept of offline or low-connectivity transactions has always been around (like USSD codes), the integration of AI and machine learning to make these transactions more context-aware is relatively newer.
Rn, there is no African tech innovation 👀 that’s using AI-driven context-aware payment to enhance its product(s). However, some global tech innovations have taken the bold step on this, they include: Worldline and ScienceSoft.
Tools/APIs to integrate AI-driven context-aware payment into your solution:
Others ways that AI is reshaping African Fintech in 2025:
Data analysis and decision making (ex: market trend forecasting), Smart payment routing, Price stability algorithms ( to manage stablecoins and digital currencies), DeFi optimisation, InsurTech (insurance tech) and finally, new job creation.
There are already demands for roles like AI trainers, data scientists, and cybersecurity specialists to manage and protect AI systems.
Have you heard??
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