The Hub provides a physical space for innovation that brings together all stakeholders. The overarching goal of the Hub is to create a local ecosystem of academics, students, and entrepreneurs to drive innovation. The Hub works closely with the MPhil in Fintech course, where students are taught hard (coding) skills to empower them towards entrepreneurship or make a meaningful impact in society through relevant industry roles.
At the Financial Innovation Hub, our funnel starts with in-depth research to fortify startups. Teaching follows, targeting Africa's skill gap and converting students into budding entrepreneurs. Community building involves policy collaboration, ensuring a startup-friendly ecosystem. All of this converges at innovation, where initiatives like the GenesisBloc Launchpad, InnovateXChange and innovation challenges turn insights into actionable innovations financial technologies, fostering startups and boosting job creation.
During their Masters thesis, students have between 3 to 12 months to take an idea from purely academic research and develop it into a prototype. This can be in the form of an open-source project or a commercially viable company. The Hub works in conjunction with these students, providing both financial and technical support to significantly increase the number of students who start their own companies.
Notably, the Financial Innovation Hub brings together Masters students, PhD students and Postdoctoral researchers who help translate the latest academic research into viable projects. On the other hand, the Hub also facilitates the knowledge transfer from the practical and application realm back to academic work. This creates a virtuous cycle between practically relevant research and research-relevant innovation. The research into blockchain applications falls under three categories: decentralised finance (DeFi), specifically the benefits of tokenisation in a decentralised marketplace; blockchain for food traceability and exploring blockchain to manage digital property rights.
Each of these initiatives is a testament to our commitment at the UCT Financial Innovation Hub to not only envisage a more innovative future for fintech but to actively construct it, ensuring our research and teaching culminate in tangible innovation that makes a difference.
Explore some of the Ventures from staff, students and members of the FinHub ecosystem.
Mudala is a carbon credit marketplace built on the Algorand blockchain. It aims to provide companies and individuals a platform to achieve carbon neutrality in pursuit of a more sustainable and green future.
This is the Fintech and Cryptocurrencies 2022 class project in partnership with Investec. It is currently in a POC phase.
Mandla Money aims to advance financial inclusion through low-tech digital products, infrastructure & services. It has launched three products so far: Mandla SMS Wallet, Mandla Pay and Mandla Whatsapp Wallet. Mandla Wallet is a digital wallet that allows users to receive, transact and store value using digital assets via SMS, with no need for a smartphone or an internet connection. Mandla Money is an opportunity to drive financial inclusion, reduce frictions with remittances (domestic and regional) and serve as a mechanism for bulk distribution of transparent & traceable relief aid/social welfare at low cost.
Accolades: Best Social Justice Use Case in the XRPL Creating Real World Impact Hackathon (2022). XRPL Grant to advance Financial Inclusion (2023).
Nautilus is a privacy-as-a-service platform that currently provides two products: First, a Trusted Compute platform which allows data creators to license the use of their personal data without loss of privacy; and second, a personal data wallet which is built on top of the Trusted Compute platform. It's core mandate is working towards the infrastructure on which digital property rights will be created, traded, and redeemed. Our mission is to enable every human on earth to own their personal data and to decide for themselves how this data can be used by others. Our vision is to create a complete replacement of the existing cloud infrastructure which has facilitated an enclosure of data. Using the Nautilus platform, data creators can create a bundle of rights to their data and then decide individually which right they grant to which third party, all without loss of privacy.
In the current world, students have limited control over what happens with their personal and academic data. Registree wants to change that. Their platform lays the foundation for a student data ecosystem which links universities, students and third parties such as employers and bursary providers with each other.
FoodPrint is a digital food supply chain platform for smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa to digitally participate in food value chains, and directly connect with buyers and other participants. Using our low-tech WhatsApp chatbot, smallholder farmers capture their harvest and sales data onto the blockchain, which gives them a credible production record that unlocks access to previously inaccessible markets and services. By anchoring in the blockchain, we obtain a single source of truth that is transparent, traceable and positions smallholder farmers to participate in the emerging Web3 economy.
Axone is a platform for content creators to collaborate in a unique way. Inspired by the theory of “parallel universes”, Axone allows content to have alternative parallel paths. Through collaboration, different creators can expand a piece of content by creating an alternate version of it! Alternate versions in turn can have alternate versions resulting in an alternative path of a content’s evolution! Features on Axone include web monetization and NFT minting.
Axone received $75,000 in grant funding from Ripple to develop it's MVP.
Led by Gary Lu, these Algorand Developer Workshops were held in April, 2023 for six sessions over two weeks in both online and in-person formats. These were entry-level, highly-practical sessions where the aim is to bootstrap potential hackathon participants and beginners looking to get coding on the Algorand blockchain.
Links to the slides used in each session are included each video. See this GitHub repository for instructions on how to access the practical components of the workshops. Participants were expected to code along to complete the smart contracts with the workshop lead in GitLab.
The Workshops were followed by a two-month long hackathon where all students affiliated with the University of Cape Town were invited to participate. 15 teams participated and 5 teams were shortlisted to pitch at the closing ceremony. The top three teams combined received a total of R235,000 in prize money comprising of bursaries and cash sponsored by the Algorand Foundation.
The week-long event welcomed students from across the entire UCT community, from first-year undergraduates to postdoctoral researchers. The 4-day Bootcamp, held in June 2024, featured sessions led by Allan Davids (Senior Lecturer at UCT), Sabine Schaller (Lead Engineer at Interledger), and Takunda Chirema (Technical Specialist at FinHub). The program covered topics such as payments, full-stack development, and the Interledger Protocol, offering both practical and theory-based content.
The event concluded with a hackathon on the 5th and 6th days, where about 40 participants formed 9 student teams to bootstrap a proof of concept and pitch their startup idea to a panel of industry-based judges. Teams competed for a prize pool of R65,000 sponsored by the Interledger Foundation
