By Lakshaa Puran
The second edition of Pulse of Fintech, organised by Equitable Ventures with the support of partners on Thursday, 10 September. The event brought together founders, investors, regulators and corporate players for three conversations spanning open banking, stable coins and tokenisation, and the intersection of credit and artificial intelligence.
Fabrice Boullé, managing partner at Equitable Ventures, said the purpose of Pulse of Fintech was to bring the different parts of that ecosystem into the same conversation. “What we tried to do today was to demonstrate that collaboration between the different players within a fintech ecosystem is actually beneficial to all,” Fabrice said.
For Atul Bhatia, Chief Fintech Officer at blink by Emtel , the answer will depend on how successfully Mauritius tackles the gaps that still exist between banks, fintechs and consumers. At Pulse of Fintech, he returned repeatedly to one of the central contradictions of Mauritius: the country is highly banked, but that does not necessarily mean it has a fully connected financial ecosystem. Mauritius has a population of around 1.3 million, while figures cited during the discussion put the number of bank cards at around 2.3 million. “Practically every Mauritian has at least two bank accounts, if not more,” Atul said.
The missing piece in open banking
Mauritius has already made progress on payments and interoperability. Customers can move funds between accounts through fintech platforms, but Atul believes an important piece of the open-banking proposition remains missing: access to information. A consumer with two or three bank accounts may be able to move money between them through a fintech application, but still has to return to individual bank applications to check balances or obtain account information. “This is, to be honest, the biggest roadblock,” he said. It is a deceptively small gap with significant consequences.
Knowing how much money is available is usually the first step before deciding whether to make a payment. If the customer has to leave the fintech platform to check their balance, they are effectively being returned to the bank’s ecosystem before the transaction even begins. “The first entry is to know my balance before I do a transaction,” he explained. That creates what he sees as a behavioural barrier for fintechs.“If I can do anything and everything from that bank account, why should I rely on a FinTech or any other ESP?” That, in many ways, is the promise and unfinished business of open banking.
The next financial services may not look like banks
Kolawole Olajide, founder and CEO of Sava Africa, approached the issue from the other side of the ecosystem. Sava Africa provides infrastructure that allows fintechs and other businesses to connect to payment systems and build financial products without becoming traditional banks themselves. The significance of that model is that financial services increasingly do not have to begin with a bank. They can begin with a platform that already has customers. “We believe the next frontier would not be built by the banks,” Kolawole said. The shift is already visible globally, with platforms incorporating payments, accounts, cards and credit into services that consumers already use.
The bank remains important, but it becomes part of the infrastructure rather than necessarily the visible destination for the customer. That shift also changes the regulatory equation. Kolawole described a progression in which banks initially provide the backbone for fintechs, with responsibility gradually moving towards the fintechs as they mature and regulators gain confidence in their ability to manage risk. It is a model that can create much greater room for innovation. But it does demand a lot of discipline. As more fintechs are gaining access to financial infrastructure, the potential attack could surface. Cybersecurity becomes a central part of the conversation, particularly because smaller fintechs may not have the financial resources or security architecture of large banks.
Data is not just another technical layer
The evolution becomes particularly important when the conversation turns to financial data. For Atul, customer consent is not a footnote to open banking. It is one of its foundations. Atul was unequivocal that open banking cannot be built around consumers simply accepting whatever permissions appear on a screen. Mauritian consumers, he said, are highly conscious of where their data sits and who owns it. That makes consent central to the model. Open banking access should be based on explicit permission, he argued, rather than buried in terms and conditions or reduced to a passive checkbox. “It should be explicit consent, time-bound, visible, and should be revocable instantly,” he said.
As financial data begins moving between institutions, the industry has to stop thinking of it simply as information sitting inside a bank’s systems. It becomes something with value and something the customer must be able to control. “In my head, consent or the data, it’s actually a product and should be treated like that.” Florent Masson, CEO of MIPS agreed with the principle from the perspective of merchants. MIPS sits between banks, fintechs and merchants, helping businesses navigate the complexity of different financial ecosystems.One of the practical frustrations, Masson explained, is duplication. A merchant dealing with several institutions can find itself repeatedly going through KYC and KYB processes. There is little appetite for weakening those safeguards. “We have to be strict about it,” Florent said.
Mauritius as a bridge, not just a market
There is an unavoidable constraint in any conversation about the country’s fintech ambitions: Mauritius is a small market. Kolawole sees a significant opportunity. Mauritius could become what he described as the “Mercury for Africa”, a platform by which fast-growing African fintechs and companies can access banking and financial infrastructure.
However, this opportunity comes with responsibilities.Cross-border licensing and passporting would have to be accompanied by clear oversight, particularly around cybersecurity and money laundering. A small market can become an effective bridge only if the trust underpinning that bridge is strong enough. Atul’s view is that Mauritius does not need to invent an entirely new model to achieve this.“We don’t need to reinvent,” he said. “All we need is good connect, the regulators talking, the government bodies talking at that level.” He pointed to the experience of India’s UPI ecosystem and to smaller jurisdictions such as Luxembourg, as examples of what can happen when scale is addressed through connectivity rather than simply through size. He also pointed to Kigali as an emerging African hub.
Mauritius does not have the population of a major continental market, but it does not necessarily need it. Its advantage could lie in connecting markets, institutions and financial systems that are otherwise difficult to navigate. blink became the first PSP licence holder in Mauritius to enable Mauritians to scan and pay in India, a natural corridor given the extensive travel, trade and personal ties between the two countries. Moving from a domestic service to an international one, however, meant effectively multiplying the complexity. “In simple terms, it required double of everything,” Atul said. The technology can move quickly. Regulation does not always move at the same speed. The challenge now is to turn those individual connections into something more systematic. “This takes time,” Atul said. “But if we don’t start, we’re already in a way late.”
