The FinHUb

September 2024 | Volume 7
A THriving ecosystem from Cape town to Zurich.
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Thought Leadership

Highlight

Annual FINHUB REPORT | 2023

We are so excited to share with you our annual report on the achievements and excellence in our community this past year

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The Hub acts as a forum to facilitate important discussions between academics and entrepreneurs from the Hub with senior policy makers and leading industry experts.
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The Hub organises at least one academic and policy conference every year, usually in conjunction with Algorand partner universities or with other leading universities. These conferences aim to bring together leading academics in our five research area work streams, as well as senior policy makers and industry participants.
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The intergovernmental fintech working group (IFWG) is the premiere forum for fintech discussions on the intersection of industry and policy in South Africa. It brings together over 200 industry participants and government officials and so far has been sponsored by the South African Reserve Bank. Home to the South African Research Chair, the Financial Innovation Hub will host the annual IFWG meetings in Cape Town.
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Furthermore, the Hub organises ad-hoc industry and policy workshops on specific topics such as practitioner workshops with industry experts which will provide a great environment to build networks.

News from around the Hub

Interledger Protocol Summit 2022
The 2022 Interledger Protocol Summit was held in New Orleans, Louisiana, from the 12th to the 13th of November at the New Orleans Marriott Warehouse Arts District. The summit brought together participants in the interledger ecosystem, including awardees of this year's financial services grants.
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Mudala
The 2022 MPhil in FinTech students recently developed a proof-of-concept decentralised exchange for carbon credit trading called Mudala. The project is the result of a use case provided by Investec Bank's Fintech Partnerships and Innovation team.
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Beaker
Beaker is a bleeding-edge smart contract development framework built on PyTeal for the Algorand Virtual Machine (AVM). A well-known engineer of Algorand Inc., Benjamin Guidarelli spearheads the framework's development.
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Devcon 2022
Anda Ngcaba participated in two panels at DevCon VI hosted in Bogota, Columbia.
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Algorand Developer Greenhouse
Asia Crypto Week took place this year from 26th September to 2nd October 2022. The event, hosted at the Flower Dome in the Marina Bay Gardens, consisted of Tech Talks which involved presentations on the ecosystem as a whole and Hack Shack which involved developer workshops.
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UBRI Connect 2022
From the 21st to the 22nd of September, UCT Financial Innovation Hub COO Anda Ngcaba, General Hub Manager Lindiwe Kers and MPhil in Fintech student Titose Chembezi attended the University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI) Connect 2022 hosted by the UCL School of Management in London.
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CBDC on Algorand
In this podcast, three experts shared their latest findings on CBDCs based on their 2022 report "Issuing Central Bank Digital Currency on Algorand".
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Swiss-South Africa blockchain collaboration
Vice-Chancellor Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng and a University of Cape Town confederation hosted the Swiss Ministerial Delegation at the New Engineering Building at UCT.
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African Startup Awards
Anda Ngcaba, our Chief of Operations (COO) participated in a panel discussion at the African Startup Awards. The theme of the panel was “Unlocking Africa’s Growth and Cascading Opportunities Through Blockchain and Digital Assets”.
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Media Coverage

See what others have to say about FinHub :)

Failure to launch: South Africa’s challenge in transforming technical talent into investable founders

techcabal

Blockchain solution to contested elections

UCT News

Research Papers

Research by our resident PostDocs, colleagues and students.
International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues
Estimating Value at Risk and Expected Shortfall: A Kalman Filter Approach
Article link

Max van der Lecq1 and Gary van Vuuren2

1School of Economics, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
2Centre for Business Mathematics and Informatics, North-West University, Potchefstroom, 2351, South Africa.

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Max van der Lecq is part of the MPhil in Fintech Class of 2022. This article originates from his masters thesis supervised by Prof. Gary van Vuuren.
Proceedings of the 57th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences | 2024
The Dynamic Effects of Blockchain-based Identity Management Adoption on Data Breaches
Article link

Sarah Mulombo Mulaji1, Irwin Brown2 and Sumarie Roodt3

1University of Cape Town
2University of Cape Town
3University of Cape Town

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Sarah Mulambo Mulaji is a PhD Researcher primarily interested in information & cyber security management and emerging technologies, especially blockchain applications and their impact on organisations and society.
Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung
When Finance Meets Big Data
Article link

Fabio de Masi

Research Fellow at the UCT Financial Innovation Hub

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Fabio De Masi is a former MEP and MP for Die Linke, where he was vice chair of the parliamentary group and its spokesperson on financial affairs. He is currently a research fellow with the Financial Innovation Hub of the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Our newsletters serve to showcase events and achievements in the FinHub ecosystem. Read our latest issue below or on LinkedIn.

Publications

FinHub Annual Report
Algorand CBDC Report

Newsfeed

Check out some of our LinkedIn posts highlighting events, ventures of our affiliates and trends in the Fintech Space. We also have a quarterly newsletter. Sign up below.

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Once a quarter, we update you on everything that FinHub and all the fun things our affiliates have been up to. You can also now find the past editions of our newsletter in our resources section.
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