Brief Project Description
At the Financial Innovation Hub our focus is on providing world-class education in financial technology to students through our Masters degree in FinTech at the University of Cape Town. Through our partnership with Interledger, we are developing and implementing an open payments curriculum for students in our degree. Each year, our students complete a capstone project, where they must build a fully operational payments app, leveraging open payments. Outside of UCT, we are also working on expanding the reach of Interledger among students in South Africa and other universities through workshops, bootcamps and hackathons.
Project Update
2024 was our first year as a grantee and what a whirlwind of a year it was. There were a lot of key learnings, but overall we're so happy with our progress this year. Two moments stand out as real highlights!
Open Payments Workshop and Hackathon
In June we hosted a week-long workshop focused on digital financial inclusion and Open Payments, open to students from UCT and elsewhere (we even had Andrew and Cory, our friends from Bowie State fly in to attend). Each day, we had a two-hour lecture, hosted by me, followed by a three-hour tutorial, led by the ILF Team (thank you Sarah, Max, Sabine) and Takunda Chirema, the Hub’s own wonderful technical specialist. In these sessions, we introduced students to Open Payments, Open Payment APIs, and the Grant Negotiation Authorisation Protocol.
The workshop concluded with a 24-hour hackathon, where teams were challenged to build an application leveraging Open Payments. While there were many great submissions, we could have only one winner: SecureLifeCover, which helps people track their funeral cover payments to ensure payments are made on time. Here are the winners with Alex and I.
We even had the winning teams demo their hackathon solutions on the ILF Community Call in July. If you missed it, you can check it out, here.
Class project
Each year, we provide our students with a capstone group project, in which they are required to build a FinTech app from scratch and come up with a business plan for the app, to mimic the process of founding a start-up. We challenged our 2024 cohort to develop a digital stokvel platform that utilized Open Payments.
Stokvels are a (in many cases informal) community investment scheme in which a group of people agree to contribute a fixed amount of money to a shared pool weekly or monthly. Stokvels contribute over R3.2 billion annually to local economies but remain largely cash-based, limiting their scalability. To address this problem, our students developed DigiStokvel - a digital solution designed to make stokvels more secure, transparent, and accessible.
Project Impact & Target Audience(s)
We've made solid progress on our key objectives.
Open payments curriculum
At our 5-day workshop this year, we taught the first version of our Open Payments course to students, taking them from having no knowledge of Interledger or Open Payments to developing an app using Open Payments in 5 days. We're busy refining the curriculum now based on key learnings from this experience and we'll implement the updated curriculum in 2025 for our next cohort of students.
Scholarships
With the ILF’s support, we could offer bursaries to cover tuition and cost of living to six students, five of which come from historically disadvantaged groups. Next year we'll give out ten scholarships!
Open payments projects
As I mentioned earlier, our students submitted their first open payments class project this year. We can't wait to see what next year's class comes up with!
Hackathons
As I mentioned earlier, our first hackathon was a major success. Here's a short highlight video.
Next year we want grow this hackathon to involve more students, especially those from other universities and education institutions outside of UCT.
Involvement with the ILF community
This year, we had our students join community calls to demo their hackathon solutons, Andrew Mangle from Bowie State, Brianna and I did a Future Money Podcast focussing on Interledger's work at Universities and I hosted a panel discussion at the Interledger Summit focussing on the cash economy in South Africa and what can be done to drive digital payment adoption, which you can re-watch, here. Most rewardingly however, we had all of our students attend the Interledger Summit in Cape Town and it was a real joy to see them interacting with the Interledger community.
Communications and Marketing
- Our official UCT Hub opening was featured on UCT news, here
- We hosted a workshop at the Blockchain Africa conference, sharing our story and how we're shaping the digital financial inclusion landscape in South Africa, here
- We also post a quarterly newsletter - The FinHub
- We also have a YouTube channel on which we upload workshops, practitioner seminars, and conferences and highlight videos of events.
What’s Next?
We are scaling up operations! We're growing our class from 10 to 20 students, with half of the class receiving a bursary from the ILF. We'll also continue to host our yearly hackathon. In terms of new work, we want to get other South African universities to join the NextGen Open Payments Program, do more collaborative work with other grantees and also start to produce some research focusing on digital financial inclusion.
Community Support
- We're always on the lookout for interesting ideas that our students could explore in their dissertations. If you have any ideas, please do get in touch with me.
- Similarly, if there are any internship-type opportunities that arise, we'd love you to consider some of our students.
Top comments (0)