Blog - Corniche Growth Advisors

17 Nov 2023

Why Fintechs and incumbents need to partner to deliver financial inclusion

Fintechs are driving the next wave of financial inclusion in Africa and other emerging markets, but they need to partner with incumbent market participants, banks and telcos in order to be successful. Why do the incumbents need Fintechs and vice versa? Where does this leave our technopreneurs in ter...

24 Oct 2023

Central Bank Digital Currencies will open new opportunities for Fintechs

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) have the potential to empower technopreneurs by offering improved financial inclusion, reduced transaction costs, enhanced security, transparency, access to international markets, and financial stability, of particular relevance in developing markets. What exa...

24 Oct 2023

Keep constructing those exit ramps

The best advice to technopreneurs is that exiting your company should be the culmination of an ongoing “strategic outreach” throughout the life of your company, and not something that only begins when you start thinking of exiting. It’s about using the clear understanding of your company’s u...

18 Sep 2023

Are Visa’s instant settlements signposting the future?

The announcement by PayPal last month that it is launching its own stablecoin PayPal USD, and Visa a couple of weeks ago, that it is extending its activities in stablecoin and blockchain-based processing seems to be building towards something. The base technology has been there for a long time, but ...

16 Aug 2023

Revenue Based Financing is coming of age

Revenue Based Funding (RBF) is becoming an important tool in a startup’s corporate finance strategy these days, as a way to extend runway, either to defer a capital raise (with valuations currently lower) or to conclude a capital raise (with transaction times currently longer). Indeed, RBF’s uni...

11 Jul 2023

All technopreneurs need an AI-ready data strategy

To kickstart AI journeys, technopreneurs need to think beyond technology and infrastructure and focus first on developing a coherent data strategy. (We should think of a “technopreneur” as being a state of mind, and not necessarily a founder of a startup, so can equally apply to a VC or the CEO ...

11 Jul 2023

Do I need an advisor if I have M&A experienced board members?

Trust is an important quality for a board, and this can be tested when funding and M&A decisions need to be made. We have witnessed the difficulty of being an advisor and non-executive board member, both from observation of clients and our own experience with boards on which we sit. The difficul...

10 Jun 2023

Venture Capital is a “crazy” high risk, high gain asset class

We come across many amazing and thriving tech companies in our day-to-day practice, which one could think of as great investments. However, Venture Capital (VC) is a “crazy” high risk, high gain asset class, with very specific characteristics, that only fits with a small subset of these. Convers...

09 Jun 2023

How to leverage ChatGPT in your startup

ChatGPT provides a powerful foundation model but knowing how to leverage and enhance it for your startup’s use case requires an understanding of its strengths and weaknesses, starting with a basic understanding of how the technology works. This article builds on my previous article Generative ...

05 May 2023

Generative AI and building competitive advantage

How can technopreneurs harness breakthrough Generative AI technology in their AI solution to build competitive advantage in product, design, marketing and even optimising business operations? Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) alg...