Andrew Watkins-Ball, founder of South African fintech start up Jumo has helped the organization develop from seven to three hundred representatives in just shy of three years, with improvement workplaces in Cape Town, Nairobi and Portugal. Watkins-Ball’s firm works in a few African nations as well as Pakistan. Early 2017, the start-up became the first South African start-up to be admitted into Google’s Launchpad Accelerator program. In November 2017, JUMO won $150 000 prize from the Mastercard Foundation. In the same month, the tech company additionally secured $24-million in debt finance.
Watkins-Ball is also the co-founder at MWB Capital, founder of Addcapital and founder at Capitau. He was the Head of the European High Yield Syndicate with Citi’s Global Capital Markets business.
Work and Achievements
Andrew has been focused on the technology and financial services sectors. He successfully built various businesses including Gateway Telecommunications, a satellite service provider, sold to Vodafone for $675m in 2008. He developed a fund focused on the application of nanotechnology in the energy sector.
His first business success came by building an event production business in Cape Town that included work for Quincy Jones and Nelson Mandela. Andrew was born in South Africa, he now lives in Cape Town and is married with three children.
During his time at CITI, he executed over $25 billion of deals. Mr. Watkins-Ball pioneered the international leveraged finance market in South Africa with Capitau, as well as other notable financi for ABB, Saudi Oger, Vivendi Universal, CCK, Heidelberg Cement, Heckler & Koch, CMA-CGM and ISS Global. He was involved in the secondary MBO of the Gateway Group and in structuring it for an optimal exit. Mr. Watkins-Ball has also been involved in various high-profile production projects, including work with Nelson Mandela and Quincy Jones.
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About Jumo
Founded in 2014, JUMO is a mobile financial services platform for mobile network operators and banks. The fintech platform facilitates digital financial services such as credit and savings in emerging markets by way of USSD short codes.
JUMO started as a mobile financial services start-up company under Ghana-based Afb, a finance business providing payroll loans to government and corporate workers and consumer loans to informal and market traders. After its potential to deliver digital financial services over mobile (primarily feature phones) became apparent, it was turned into a standalone business
serving mostly unbanked merchants and individuals in emerging markets where the amount of active mobile money users is high.As at September 2016, it had delivered more than 10 million loans to customers in 6 countries including Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, Rwanda and Uganda.
As Andrew and the rest of his team at Jumo continue to expand the frontiers of Financial Technology in South Africa, we hope that his remarkable achievements spur aspiring techpreneur across Africa to take the bull by the horns and keep being the best in every of their innovations so as to meet up with their contemporaries in the tech space across the globe.