SmartCard Marketing Systems announces entering a JV partnership with KanaCash

By Edlyn Cardoza

SmartCard recently announced a joint venture partnership with KanaCash, a digital FinTech organisation in Africa.

The partnership aims at providing KanaCash SmartCard’s proprietary Intellectual Property Portfolio offering to enable a marketplace linked with a digital wallet for the merchant and customers based in Africa – offering them a unique solution in digital payments.

The JV enables KanaCash to reach their goal and aims at capitalising and implementing the tech suite in the untapped market.

More than two million Sub-Saharan African immigrants living in the US transfer money to families regularly. More individuals have a mobile money account than a traditional bank account in Sub-Saharan Africa. Access to mobile money agents is more widespread than bank branches, particularly in rural areas. As a result, mobile money is quickly becoming the preferred method to receive remittances. However, it is still not widely available by the key players in the market.

KanaCash will start sending remittances from the US to 11 African markets. Remittance inflows to Sub-Saharan Africa soared 14.1% to $49 billion in 2021. The business opportunity for a cutting-edge platform coupled with deep knowledge of the African diaspora and local (Africa) markets positions KanaCash to quickly capture market share, compete, and scale.

In addition, mobile money transaction is becoming the preferred payment method in Africa. Yet, about 60% of the African population (around 100 million people) remain without a traditional banking account. The unbanked population has a high penetration of smartphones poising a unique opportunity for a FinTech company like KanaCash.

KanaCash has offered a 15% stake in their company to SmartCard Marketing Systems Inc. at a valuation of $4 million as part of this initiative in exchange for licensing.

CEO & Co-Founder McSwain Forkoh stated, “We are excited about the Joint Venture with SmartCard. With this JV, KanaCash is positioned to drive seamless customer experience and interoperability in remittance and payments across Africa.”

The CEO of SmartCard, Massimo Barone, stated, “We are pleased to partner with KanaCash as a part of our accelerator program and we are excited to be the first to tap the market with this Joint Venture. Our collaboration with KanaCash expands our reach and is a major milestone for us to create adaptive offerings in Digital payments for the growth of local markets in Africa – also expanding Axepay’s global payment rails network.”

Barone continued, “We are also extending the services to capture multi-industry services in E-commerce, Mobility, Brick/Mortar Retail and scale with AR/VR for the Metaverses. The IP suite of SMKG:OTCQB comprises of 20+ platforms which include 8 marketplace technologies – All in one company.”

The market segments for the technologies include Banking 4.0, Web 3.0, Payments, Cross-Border Payments, Retail Wallets, Omnichannel, NFT Minting, Crypto Issuing, Digital Assets Tokenisation, Blockchain Multi-porting and most recently, Metaverse(s).