Fintech solutions company, SmartCard Marketing Systems Inc (SMKG: OTCQB) has today announced a joint venture partnership with African remittances firm, KanaCash.
The partnership intends to give KanaCash access to SmartCard Systems’ proprietary Intellectual Property portfolio to give merchants and customers in Africa a unique payment solution of a marketplace linked with a digital wallet.
By integrating with existing local infrastructure, KanaCash provides Africans in the diaspora with an innovative web and mobile application tailored to the mobile payment needs of Sub-Saharan Africa.
SmartCard Marketing Systems Inc comes in as an industry leader providing a wide range of business intelligence and Digital Transformation Strategies to the global PayTech and FinTech markets.
The SMKG proprietary portfolio includes applications and wireframes for banking, enterprises and retail e-Wallets offering Blockchain Protocols, crypto issuing, NFT minting, tokenization, digital ID-eKYC, and Digital Automation Strategies with “License to Own” marketplace application.
With SMKG’s specialized industry tools and data, the partnership aims to enable KanaCash to reach its goal and aims to capitalise and implement the tech suite in the untapped market.
KanaCash currently provides international remittances between the US and Liberia, Ghana and Kenya and the partnership will allow them to expand to 11 African markets that are yet to be disclosed.
SMKG has purchased a 15% stake (valued at $4 million) in KanaCash as part of the initiative in exchange for licensing.
For the more than two million Sub-Saharan African immigrants living in the US who transfer money to families regularly, this could be a good sign.
While remittances to Sub-Saharan Africa rose by 14.1% to $49 billion in 2021, the main challenges of high costs and reliance on mobile money still stand for the largely unbanked population.
This presents a unique opportunity for KanaCash to leverage the aspects of Web3 to avail a cost-friendly and easily accessible method to send and receive money.
KanaCash CEO & Co-Founder McSwain Forkoh stated, “We are excited about the Joint Venture with SmartCard. With this JV, KanaCash is positioned to drive seamless customer experience and interoperability in remittance and payments across Africa.”
The partnership is part of SMKG’s accelerator program to extend its reach as an all in one company providing multi-industry services in the world of e-commerce from its collection of over 20 platforms that include 8 marketplaces.
According to the SMKG CEO, Massimo Barone, the collaboration is “a major milestone to create adaptive offerings in digital payments for the growth of local markets in Africa – also expanding Axepay’s global payment rails network.”
Axepay is a cross-border payment platform with SKMG and including this will put KanaCash closer to its objective of offering a full-scale digital payment platform with mobile money, Point of Sales Terminals (POS), online payments, Automatic Teller Machines (ATM) connectivity etc.