Konnect Networks, founded in January 2021, is a pioneering payment orchestration platform in Tunisia. After two years of dialoguing with the Central Bank, the fintech has received first the payment facilitator licence.Founder and CEO Amin Ben Abderrahman tells Condia that Konnect now has a 4% market share of the country’s online payments space with 20% CMGR over a year.Last year, Visa chose Konnect as the only Tunisian startup to participate in the first cohort of its highly competitive Africa Fintech Accelerator which had an acceptance rate of 2.2% of 1044 applications. Fellow pioneering neo-bank Flouci, licensed by the Central Bank of Tunisia, got into the second cohort of the Visa Africa Fintech Accelerator Program. No Tunisian startup is in the current cohort.Recently, Konnect raised $1.5 million from Renew Capital, 54 Collective, Visa, Plug and Play Africa and others. The paytech startup was Renew Capital’s first investment in Tunisia.Konnect was Amin’s third attempt, in five years, at building a company that the market wanted.As part of our ongoing series spotlighting the Tunisian ecosystem, we interviewed Amin to learn firsthand what it is like to be an entrepreneur in Tunisia, particularly in the fintech space.Enjoy the full conversation that has only been lightly edited for clarity.Benjamin: How did you get into the world of startups and entrepreneurship?Amin: I come from the world of corporate finance. My whole career before being an entrepreneur was supporting big companies in their consolidation process within international firms.In 2016, I decided to try entrepreneurship, after working in multiple countries—the United Kingdom, Cameroon, and Switzerland—as the technical right-hand of financial departments within these international groups. I co-founded a company called Vink (Bitinar) to save all local transactions to the Bitcoin ledger. I lost $15,000 in coming up with a proof-of-concept. Clearly, it was too early to try to do something between Bitcoin and the Tunisian dinar, called e-dinar. In the second company, I was the CTO. It was called T-Ledger, Tunisian Ledger. For this one, we focused on the underlying technology of bitcoin, not bitcoin itself. So we built something based on the hyperledger fabric, like a blockchain system. And we were trying to sell it to banks with a white or grey label. It was a solution for banks to offer bank-led mobile money payment capabilities, not telco-led mobile money. This is because North Africa doesn’t have mobile money like in East Africa [Safaricom, a telco, is the mobile money leader in Kenya], for example. So, we spent, one year and a half, maybe two years, building this solution and trying to sell it to banks. Banks were very much interested, but none of them was ready to really sign this kind of project. It was clearly too early, again, or maybe we focused a little bit too much on the technology and they were a little bit afraid of going into these disruptive technologies. It
Sab. Gen 11th, 2025
