What Africa’s SMEs Really Need From Fintech

Johannesburg, 1 July 2025 – At the recently concluded Finance Magnates Africa Summit (FMAS) 2025 in Cape Town, leading South African fintech ProfitShare Partners called for a shift in focus across the continent’s financial services sector — away from headline-grabbing innovations and toward practical, scalable solutions that unlock real SME growth.

Since its founding in 2017, ProfitShare Partners has paid out over R1.2 billion to SMEs, with more than 90% of funded businesses owned by previously disadvantaged individuals. At FMAS 2025, the company used the platform to spotlight a model that has been unlocking economic participation at scale.

“There was a lot of noise in fintech — from AI-driven platforms and embedded finance to super apps. But the reality is that millions of African SMEs still couldn’t access the capital they needed to grow,” said Andrew Maren, founder and CEO of ProfitShare Partners. “We believed the next wave of innovation needed to focus on inclusion, not just infrastructure.”

Rethinking SME Finance for Real Impact

ProfitShare Partners was established to solve a fundamental problem: South Africa’s financial system wasn’t built to fund entrepreneurs without existing assets, long credit histories, or formalised structures.

Rather than relying on traditional lending criteria, the company offered transactional funding — capital linked directly to a verified contract or purchase order. This deal-by-deal model enabled SMEs to unlock working capital quickly, execute on real opportunities, and share in the upside with PSP as a growth partner.

Some clients experienced over 1,000% growth in just 12 months, while the company’s average annual portfolio growth sat at 292%.

“We were not trying to replace banks. What we built was a critical layer in the funding ecosystem — one that helped entrepreneurs become contract-ready, scale responsibly, and eventually graduate to conventional finance,” added Maren.

Aligning Fintech with Function

As FMAS 2025 turned the spotlight on the future of financial services in Africa, ProfitShare Partners advocated for fintech models that solved for liquidity — not just convenience.
“Super apps and embedded finance are important, but they are only as impactful as the capital that flows through them. For Africa’s middle class to thrive, we needed SMEs to grow — and that started with access to fast, fair, and flexible working capital,” Maren said.

With a growing emphasis on AI and automation at the summit, PSP also highlighted the importance of using technology to simplify and accelerate decision-making, not create new exclusion barriers. The company’s internal funding processes already leveraged real-time data and alternative risk models to assess SME readiness and deploy capital efficiently.

Scaling a Purpose-Driven Model

Looking ahead, ProfitShare Partners is enhancing its fintech infrastructure to integrate with procurement APIs, compliance automation tools, and other embedded finance platforms, ensuring SME funding becomes even more seamless, measurable, and inclusive.

“The best fintech isn’t about looking flashy — it’s about solving real problems for real people. As the sector gathered in Cape Town for FMAS, we hoped to see the conversation move from possibilities to priorities. Because until we get SME finance right, no app or algorithm is going to close the inclusion gap,” Maren concluded.