Nigeria’s Silicon Valley, Lagos, dropped 22 places to rank 93rd in the 2021 Global Fintech Rankings.
The city’s ranking nosedived according to the new report released by findexable, which identifies emerging hubs, fintech companies and trends.
The new ranking, powered by Mambu, shows that 2020 was a year in which the financial technology (‘fintech’) sector expanded globally, building upon a surge in demand for technology that increases access to digital finance.
While Lagos slumped in the report, Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya, jumped 26 places upwards to rank 37th on the global ranking. It is the only African city in the top 50 category of cities around the globe, according to the report.
Accra, Ghana’s capital city, dropped 28 places to rank 151 on the global ranking of cities.
Within the year, over 50 new cities and 20 new countries were added to the index, meaning that they host the headquarters of at least 10 privately-owned fintech companies.
Meanwhile, among the 83 countries ranked in the index, Nigeria dropped five places to rank 57th behind Kenya, which moved eleven steps upward to rank 31st.
Africa’s largest economy also ranked behind South Africa, which equally dropped seven places to rank 44th.
The Index algorithm ranks the fintech ecosystems of more than 250 cities across 83 countries incorporating data from findexable’s own records and collated and verified by its Global Partnership Network, including Crunchbase, StartupBlink, SEMrush and 60+ fintech associations globally.
The index was first published in 2019 and has seen a huge uptake by the fintech industry.
This year’s Global Fintech Rankings report shows that although major technology and finance centres like London, New York and San Francisco are still global centres of development, the fintech industry is becoming more geographically diverse.
African countries that debuted on the list include the Seychelles, Rwanda, Tunisia, Zimbabwe and Somalia, while cities like Riyadh and Tel Aviv moved up the rankings.
The new report comes a week after the Global Startup Ecosystem Index 2021, released by StartupBlink, said Lagos switched places with Nairobi as the continent’s top start-up hub.
“The Nigerian city of Lagos has become the top African startup ecosystem, ranked 122nd after switching places with Nairobi, Kenya, which now ranks 136th,” the report said.
The Nigerian commercial city ranked in the global top 50 cities for E-commerce & Retail Technology and in the global top 100 for both Transportation Technology and Education Technology.
