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Announcing the Winners of the Alliance Hack

New York October 7, 2020 – We are delighted to announce that TymeGlobal, from South Africa, has won The Female Economy FinTech of the Year award as the top-scoring participant in the Alliance Hack 2020: Driving the Female Economy. Ndovu, from Kenya, earned the Female Economy Silver Fintech Award, and GFI Fintech, from Malaysia, earned the Female Economy Bronze Fintech Award. Winners were revealed on the second day of the Alliance Annual Summit, following pitches from the top five finalists. Our panel of expert nine judges scored the solutions based on a thorough evaluation of the creativity of ideas, scalability, and relevance to the female economy

The Alliance Hack was born out of our latest research into fintech and the female economy, published in our report:  “How Fintechs can profit from the Multi-Trillion-Dollar Female Economy.” It was supported by our host, the Singapore Fintech Festival and APIX, our partners include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Mastercard Start Path, Swift, AXA and We-fi, and our contributors from our wide network of financial institution members. Challenges in four challenge tracks—banking, wealth, insurance, and payments.  were tackled by twelve shortlisted teams from ten different countries. 

These teams pitched to an expert judges panel: Amy Neale, Senior Vice President, Mastercard; Damien PANG, Deputy Chief FinTech Officer, Monetary Authority of Singapore; Delphine Maisonneuve, CEO and Group Chief Innovation Officer, AXA Next; Inez Murray, Chief Executive Officer, Financial Alliance for Women; Jennifer Flowers, ASP Head of Partnership & Innovation, HSBC; Sharon TOH, Head of ASEAN region, SWIFT; Virginia Tan, Founding Partner of Teja Ventures, Founder of She Loves Tech, Co-Founder and President of Lean In China; Wendy Teleki, Head of the We-Fi Secretariat, We-fi ; Angela Nieto, Technology SVP, BHD León.

This is one of the first global initiatives aimed at motivating fintechs to focus on the women’s market, reflecting our belief that fintechs can be a game changer in driving women’s financial inclusion and independence.

We are pleased to award TymeGlobal with the $25,000 USD cash prize and automatic entry into the finals for Mastercard’s award-winning Start Path program, as well as award to the top three teams complimentary year-long membership to the Financial Alliance for Women. 

About the Winners

TymeGlobal is working to bring down barriers that keep women from accessing finance in South Africa, including their limited data footprint, collateralized-based lending infrastructure, and unconscious bias on the part of both the financial institutions and women SMEs. To overcome these challenges, TymeGlobal is partnering with Jumper.ai to expand the data footprint of women SMEs and increase opportunities for lending from financial institutions. Together, Tyme and Jumper.ai will provide the tools to open digital storefronts on social media through Jumper’s conversational commerce platforms and sales bots, enabling female entrepreneurs to better manage their inventory, fulfillment and delivery, and payment systems. This will allow Tyme’s women-led SMEs to increase revenues and better track revenues, providing the foundation for alternative data credit scoring and opening up access to financing.   
Ndovu  seeks to close the gender gap in investing causes by barriers to access such as large amounts of money needed to get started, high financial advisory fees, and opaque, jargon-filled processes. Ndovu provides education, advice, and access to help women achieve their longterm financial plans and build financial resilience. It does this through two steps: 1) financial planning with an app that provides simple educational tools to improve users’ financial knowledge, and 2) investment management based on each users’ financial goals and provides returns significantly above the savings rate, helping them to recover.

GFI Fintech is a data analytic tech company that specializes in profiling technology for the financial industry. It develops cutting edge solutions by integrating multiple scientific disciplines, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, behavioral sciences and psychometrics. Its flagship product – GFI –  which is an AI-based psychometric credit risk assessment, predicts whether an individual will default on a loan and has been used since 2018. GFI enables banks to confidently lend to customers with no formal credit history – many of whom are women. It allows banks to expand its market, improve repayment and contribute to enhancing the economic empowerment and financial inclusion of women and low-income individuals.