#65 - A Recap of 2024 and Frontier Fintech’s Plans for 2025

Building a Pan-African Fintech Media Platform

Illustrated by Mary Mogoi - Website

Hi all - This is the 66th edition of Frontier Fintech. A big thanks to my regular readers and subscribers. To those who are yet to subscribe, hit the subscribe button below and share with your colleagues and friends. Support Frontier Fintech by becoming a paid subscriber🚀

Reach out at samora@frontierfintech.io for sponsorships, partner pieces and advisory work.

🔊This is the last post of 2024, the next post will be on January 12th, 2024.

Remember, the more you refer your friends, the more you can access paywalled content. For instance, 3 referrals gives you a month of paid content and 6 referrals gives you three months.

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Frontier Fintech in 2024

This is the last post of 2024 before we break for the festive season and return in the new year. Most of us will be spending time with family and loved ones and I don’t think that Fintech insights will be top of our priority lists. We will come back with fresh content in the new year. I’d like to wish you all a happy festive season and happy new year and most importantly, a big thank you for the regular readers of this publication.

I relaunched the newsletter in September this year and focused on making this a sustainable business in the long-term and this is a end of year report card for the growing subscriber base and supporters of this newsletter. I will highlight the progress we’ve made in our monetisation efforts, our core value and principles, our goals for 2025 and some of the initiatives we hope to launch in the new year.

This year we launched Frontier Fintech GPS, a weekly summary of key news items. It is slowly gaining traction in terms of repeat readership and growth in total number of readers. It’s growth will be a function of useful news, useful insights and training readers that it should be part of your weekly Fintech news digest. I will look to add more valuable information such as Fintech data as well as jobs boards.

Monetisation Efforts

Paid Subscriptions

We put a good chunk of our content behind the paywall starting in October this year. The growth in paid subscribers has been slow and steady but I think it will pick up over time, our conversion rate is the standard Substack conversion rate of 3-5% of overall subscribers. Growing this is a function of consistently producing good content as well as finding a way to bundle paid content with in-person engagement to further enhance the value proposition of a paid subscription. This is part of the agenda for 2025 and will be a key focus area of mine. Some of the feedback around paid subscription has been around this bundling of newsletter content with deeper community engagement. My sales efforts around subscription will focus not only on individual subscribers but group subscriptions to corporates and other organisations involved in Pan-African Fintech. A strong paid subscriber base is important for sustainability as it provides a reliable base of recurring revenue or even up-front revenue for those who pay annual. Interestingly, over 60% of total paid subscriptions are annual subscriptions.

Sponsorships

My approach around sponsorships has been two-fold with a decent amount of success on both approaches. There are two ways in which Frontier Fintech works with organisations to leverage Frontier Fintech’s growing reach and influence. The latter of which is a strong function of me continuing to write deeply researched, unbiased articles.

The first approach is straight forward newsletter sponsorship (Featured Post) which is what you’ve seen at the top of each newsletter with Skaleet. In this approach, a brand is trying to build brand awareness and top of mind recall amongst Africa’s key Fintech decision makers. To this end, a quarterly or monthly newsletter sponsorship makes sense. This is targeted to industries that are selling in the Pan-African B2B Fintech. Ideally, your product should be well known in terms of buyer behaviour and process, but you want to highlight some unique aspects around your product. This cuts across from Core Banking Providers, Payment Providers, Card Networks, Recruitment Services, Digital Banking Platforms and other well known B2B Fintech categories.

The second aspect of Sponsorships is Paid Partner Pieces. These are collaborations between Frontier Fintech and companies within the B2B Fintech space. Where this differs with the Featured Post strategy is that you need to educate the market on your product so that the market has a better understanding of how to buy and categorise your product. Where Frontier Fintech offers value is that we have domain expertise, understand positioning and most importantly can combine strategic insights with creative story telling. This is useful for players who are solving a new problem in the market or have a novel approach to an existing problem. It’s a well written article that has the standard deep research and well crafted story approach. The Generalist has done this well with features on both Brex and Mercury.

For both, we have a solid pipeline of work and we continue to onboard new clients. Reach out to samora@frontierfintech.io if either of these products work for you. Remember, space is filling up.

Advisory

Frontier Fintech does advisory work with clients through two approaches.

1. Recurring advisory work - This is through retainer agreements where we support clients with ongoing advisory support. This works for two core groups;

   1. VCs or Accelerators with a portfolio of early stage Fintech companies that need advice at the early stage of a business with efforts such as go-to market strategy, product validation and other core insights that help shape their entire business. This is delivered through primarily meetings with the start-ups in the accelerator or VC portfolio on an “as need be” basis;

   2. The second group is companies that find value in having me as an advisor to support with strategic insights on an ongoing basis. These could be clients looking to enter the African market or African companies thinking through new products, competitive positioning, focus markets or pivots.

2. Bespoke Advisory work - These are short-term engagements, a month or two of ongoing work to support with market studies, product analysis, market entry work, validation and other similar studies. These are targeted at companies or organisations. For instance, if you’re a Fintech looking to launch a new product and want comprehensive market research and insights on the market, Frontier Fintech can support you. Our value is that we actually have domain expertise and are clear thinkers around Fintech in Africa. We don’t lie to ourselves.

Across both sponsorships and advisory, our policy is the same and can be found here - Frontier Fintech Partner Policy. The whole idea behind this is that the only thing in our balance sheet is trust and we cannot afford to lose that by working on the wrong projects and with the wrong partners.

What Didn’t Work

Our online community has not taken off as it should. Online communities are a cold-start problem and you can’t force them. Our approach to this will be to curate in-person events and organically build a community through this. I still think that this is a core plan of Frontier Fintech’s long-term value. Both existing subscribers and creators who are ahead of me have advised me to consider. We will be looking at kick-starting these efforts in 2025.

Frontier Fintech in 2025

Prior to even highlighting what our goals are in the coming year, it’s important to explain why we think we exist. Simply, what is Frontier Fintech’s reason? It’s simple; my experience in the industry both in the banking sector and within a start-up have showed me that speed is the most critical aspect of success. For a start-up, meeting the right partner 6 months earlier can make the difference between survival and failure. To succeed, you must accelerate your time to insight and time to execution. This speed runs across three core aspects - insights, networks and your own personal development. Therefore Frontier Fintech’s goal is to;

Accelerate Fintech Outcomes in Africa through insights, networks and personal development

If we can make a founder understand his/her market faster, meet the right partners faster and grow both himself and his/her team faster then we’re succeeding. This similar approach works for larger incumbent organisations. Time to insight is critical for success. This is reflected in the sheer number of bank execs who are regular readers of this publication. For us, Fintech is the intersection of Finance and Technology and that Venn diagram will over the long-term merge into a circle. We’re here for that journey and that requires a well rounded understanding of both the fundamentals of finance and where technology is headed.

The interesting aspect about a newsletter or modern media business is that it has to truly reflect your authentic self. You can’t fake it. Through truly representing yourself then you build a genuine community of like minded people and we think we’re doing that. Often I’ve been asked to be more snappy or to cover juicier aspects of Fintech but that is not me. I can’t fake it. The way I look at problems is to understand them and go deep into communicating every aspect of that problem. Of course I can be more concise and I’m working towards that but I can’t change the tone of this newsletter. This tone will be a constant presence in all our initiatives. This tone can be summarised as;

1. Deep research;

2. Comprehensive analysis;

3. No hype;

4. No Self-promotion;

5. Getting to the heart of issues;

6. Authenticity

Frontier Fintech’s Business Model

We are inspired by global leaders such as “The Ken” in India, the Generalist and Lenny’s Newsletter in the USA. At core, we have a media business that will consist of the newsletter and other media formats with time. This core will be focused on creating world class content that matters and is influenced by our own taste and preferences. The aim of this media will be to grow our readership and trust. This is the first concentric ring of what is Frontier Fintech’s long-term business. On top of this concentric ring will be value added services to the Fintech ecosystem. Through partnerships or directly, we will add value added services aimed at solving some of the core challenges in Pan-African Fintech. These include;

1. Executive Recruitment - Finding Talent is one of the largest problems in Pan-African Fintech. A CEO of a Neobank recently told me how she struggled recruiting for one position for over a year. The challenge was that she needed a unique skill-set that is not easily available in the market. This was a dark-talent problem, a problem that will continue to grow. Dark talent is people who are talented and capable but are hard to find. Frontier Fintech has the expertise to understand these problems and is building the network to solve these problems;

2. Executive Education - Through partnerships or ourselves directly, we will build training programs aimed at alleviating some of the talent issues in the market. Again, we will combine our understanding of the ecosystem and our community to build curated material for the ecosystem;

3. Advisory work - As described above, we will offer bespoke advisory services to players in the market looking to solve problems. We are already on our way there.

Each concentric ring of our business will be built to be entirely sustainable and over the long-term, if we’re successful, we will aggressively re-invest to drive more value into the ecosystem. To succeed we will need to;

1. Grow our media and our reach;

2. Grow our team and our capabilities;

3. Add more value to our community;

4. Be disciplined operators;

2025 Initiatives

Some of the initiatives we have planned for the year are;

Frontier Fintech Podcast

I will be launching a podcast in the first quarter of 2025. The podcast will be seasonal and I’m aiming to have two seasons a year of 10 episodes each. The aim of the podcast will be to sit down with world class operators and investors in Pan-African Fintech and discuss the issues that matter. The tone will be the same as what I have highlighted. Deep research, comprehensive discussion, no self promotion and using my domain expertise to dig deeper into specific problems. One of the things I’d love to do is to speak to the hidden operators in the ecosystem. Those people that have made significant impact and may not be well known. I recently wrote an article about Kamal of Little and Craft Silicon and whereas he’s well known in Kenya, both Kamal and I were surprised at some of the global attention he got. Such a conversation should be a podcast and not an article.

If you want to sponsor a season, please reach out at samora@frontierfintech.io

Frontier Fintech Events Series

Also in Q1, we’ll host our inaugural event. It will be a smaller event, likely a mixer towards the end of Q1 targeted again at elite operators and investors in Pan-African Fintech. This will be an exclusive events series held across our key markets of Nairobi, Lagos, Cape Town and London. We will be sharing more details of our inaugural event towards mid January. The tone will be the same, getting the best minds in a room and having zero-fluff discussions around Pan-African Fintech with self-promotion dialled all the way to zero. Ultimately, we will attract the right minds and build a community that is congruent with what Frontier Fintech really is. I think if we get it right we can build a world class Pan-African Fintech events series done through a mix of monthly mixers, quarterly conferences and annual summits. A key insight will be to get a cross-section of the Fintech ecosystem from bank operators to investors to start-up founders. My core belief is that start-ups need to speak less to each other and more to industry and we hope we can facilitate this.

The aim will be to start small and based on feedback, build from there.

How will we pull it off?

This all sounds like a lot, nonetheless there are some things that make me confident that we can pull it off.

1. Finding the right people - I will be looking to work with the best minds and operators to help me execute. A world class podcast producer, a great events person and a great ops person will be part of the team running each element end to end;

2. Build the right partnerships - Where possible, we will work with partners on some initiatives such as exec recruitment or executive training;

3. Leverage on AI - AI is a game changer to knowledge work. What I’ve learned from my use of AI across multiple models such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude is that ultimately, the core differentiator will be taste and judgement. I’m reminded of scientists such as Einstein and Ernest Rutherford who may not have been great at computation and the grunt work of physics but had world class intuition. Their core value was that they knew the questions to ask and the areas to explore. I think this is what AI does, your differentiator will be having the domain expertise and imagination to know which questions to ask, how to frame them and how to guide your AI.

All these should enable Frontier Fintech to achieve all its goals.

Wrapping it Up

To wrap it up, I want to again thank all the subscribers both paid and unpaid, partners, sponsors and advisory clients for supporting the newsletter. Wishing you happy holidays and may we all have a prosperous 2025.