AFRICA DIGITAL PAYMENT INFRASTRUCTURE

Promoter – Financial Intermediary

INTOUCH SAS

Location

• Regional - Africa

Description

The investment programme concerns various different measures driving the promoter's medium term growth strategy. Such strategy plans to strengthen and standardise the technical platform, develop new payment services, a new type of terminals, including the geographical expansion from about 11 countries today to more than 20 countries all over Africa by 2024.

Objectives

The aim is to easy and widespread access to enhanced digital financial services help developing countries to accelerate the economic development and the transformation to a digital economy through private sector digitalisation and increased entrepreneurship. The transformation to a digital economy is at the centre of the African Union's economic and social development's strategy.

Sector(s)

• Services - Financial and insurance activities

Proposed EIB finance (Approximate amount)

EUR 10 million

Total cost (Approximate amount)

EUR 22 million

Environmental aspects

The project comprises mostly software development for payment services and IT investments for the African expansion. The operation of the productive IT systems is not handled by the promoter itself. It has been outsourced to a well-known service provider in Europe. Therefore the project does not fall under Annexes I and II of the EU Directive 2014/52/EU amending the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Directive 2011/92/EU, and it is also not subject to mandatory EIA.

Procurement

The promoter is a private company operating in the financial sector, which is exempted from public procurement requirements. The procedures applied will be verified in detail during the appraisal.

Status

Signed - 23/02/2023