Successful fintech innovation in Africa must begin with the market, not assumptions, Fidelity Bank Ghana’s mobile financial services head told the 3i Africa Summit in Accra this month.
Dr Prince Osei Hyeaman-Addai, the bank’s Head of Mobile Financial Services, argued during an ecosystem roundtable that platforms built without sustained dialogue with users tend to miss the real problems they were designed to solve. The summit ran from May 6 to 8 at the Destiny Arena and drew more than 3,000 delegates from over 60 countries.
“When you start off, you start with the market,” Hyeaman-Addai said.
He drew on Fidelity Bank’s years of work in digital financial services and mobile money partnerships to argue that lasting innovation rests on deep understanding of customer behaviour, trust, and local realities. Even when a product is scaled back or reworked, he added, developers must return to users and ask what they got wrong.
Beyond technology, Hyeaman-Addai pointed to trust, structure, and credibility as the factors that attract investment into African fintech ecosystems. Funding opportunities exist, he said, but startups must demonstrate viability, honesty, and long term thinking. He also referenced collaborations with fintech players such as IT Consortium, partnerships he said helped pioneer wallet to bank integrations and digital financial solutions in Ghana.
Adeline Aryee, Fidelity Bank’s Director of the Financial Institutions Group, used a separate panel on Digital Public Infrastructure to call for stronger investment in African owned digital rails and payment systems. Reliance on external payment rails for local transactions, she argued, places unnecessary pressure on African currencies and slows economic sovereignty across the continent.
She pointed to Ghana’s domestic Gh-link infrastructure as an example of capacity that often goes underused, and described Ghana’s record on financial inclusion as a blueprint other African economies could adopt. The next phase, she said, must shift from inclusion to ownership and value capture.
The 3i Africa Summit, in its third year, was organised by the Bank of Ghana and Development Bank Ghana in partnership with Elevandi and the Global Finance and Technology Network under the theme “The Next Frontier: Shaping Africa’s Integrated FinTech Future.” Fidelity Bank Ghana served as a sponsor and joined panel sessions covering digital infrastructure, fintech innovation, and the future of the continent’s digital economy.
