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Nairobi is the city with the largest fintech ecosystem in Africa, according to 2021 Global Fintech Rankings.
Kenya’s commercial nerve centre jumped 26 places upwards to rank 37th on the global ranking.
According to the report, Nairobi is the only African city in the top 50 category of cities around the globe.
The report comes after the recently released Global Startup Ecosystem Index 2021, which shows that Nairobi replaced Lagos as Africa’s top startup centre.
Lagos dropped in city rankings to position 93rd in the Global Fintech Ranking, a report which identifies emerging hubs, fintech firms and trends.
Accra also dropped in the 2021 rankings by 28 places to position 151 on the global ranking of cities.
Some 50 new cities and 20 countries, which host the HQ of at least ten privately owned fintechs, have joined the index in 2021.
In the country rankings, Nigeria slipped five places to rank 57th while Kenya moved 11 spots upwards to rank at 31st position. South Africa was at position 44.
Eighty-three countries and 265 cities were analyzed in the 2021 edition, and rankings are done by an algorithm that looks at data captured by StarupBlink and verified by Findexable.
The data comes from over 60 fintech associations worldwide and platforms such as SEMrush and Crunchbase.
Findexable says its proprietary algorithm ignores subjective data (such as interviews) and only considers data such as the number of fintechs in a particular country or city and their characteristics (aspects like web presence, monthly visits, customer base, and market value).
The city with the largest fintech ecosystem globally is San Francisco in the US, followed by London, New York, Sao Paulo, Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Singapore.
The 2021 Global Fintech Rankings report shows that while London, New York and San Francisco are still global financial centres, other new players such as Seychelles, Rwanda, Tunisia, Zimbabwe, and Somalia, have joined the party.
Cities like Riyadh and Tel Aviv have improved their rankings significantly, with Tel Aviv now among the top 10 in the world.
Out of the 83 countries in the 2021 rankings, more than 20% are new entrants.
This means that emerging markets and digitally savvy but underbanked populations continue to be sources of fintech innovation.
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