FinTechIsrael November 2nd Event Highlights

The evening was hosted by FinTechIsrael Co-Founder and Vice Chairman, Eli Magid, who, together with the rest of his organizsation attempt to bring people together to discuss the crossing points of financial services and new technologies.

Pizzas were quickly followed by the evening’s keynote speaker, Errol Damelin, CEO and Founder of Wonga, Britains biggest short term consumer lender. Mr. Damelin’s presentation highlited his company’s vision about disrupting the conservative lending market in the UK by creating what he termed as ‘good-guy banking’.

The result was a fully automated, short term lending service that has revolutionize the way Briton’s take short term loans. The company site allows people to get a loan in just fifteen minutes, choosing the ammount to be borrowed, and length of loan using an ultra simple interface that is geared towards total transparency and simplicity. The normal lending services don’t seem to be any match as Wonga has become the biggest lender of its type in the UK, according to Mr. Damelin.

The following presentation was headed by Ex.Africa’s CEO, and founder Amijai Saragovy who touched on his recent experiences in setting up offices for his financial star-up in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa. Ex.Africa’s goal is to provide high quality business inteligence for the continent of Africa, something that is sorely lacking today.

The company has devised a data collecting system that offers African business owners incentives to provide financial data about their enterprises without fear of having their data compromised. Ex.Africa is busying itself with collecting and annalysing this data in order to produce marketable BI reports for investors world wide. TheWadi has been following Ex,Africa’s progress closely since launch.

Last on the evening’s roster was Yaron Samid, Founder and CEO of, among other things, BillGuard (formerly known as CrowdSpot). The company is a personal finance security startup, powered by crowd-sourced consumer vigilance, as Mr Samid explained it. BillGuard is currently in a very stealthy, friends & family, Alpha mode offering a single page site for requesting invites. From what we gathered the planned business plan is also modeled on ‘good-guy’ banking, and we hope to offer more information about this company soon.