Science
Tebogo Mokwena bit.ly/3vcTF7v
Current position: Co-founder and CTO at Akiba Digital
Past positions: Digital Analyst at McKinsey & Company President of World Merit South Africa Software Developer at Allan Gray Proprietary Limited
Academic history: 2017 Master of Science in Computational Science at Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland 2015 Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Genetics and Biochemistry at UCT (with a one-year exchange programme at University of California, Los Angeles)
146 / CAREERS SERVICE GUIDE 2021
What is Akiba Digital and what led you to creating it? Akiba is a next generation financial marketplace that is AI and data driven. Our mission is to help Africans build a better relationship with their money. The idea for Akiba Digital stemmed from the rigidity of financial systems as they exist today; they don’t cater for the bottom of the pyramid and are not very inclusive. We decided to use alternative datasets to enable financial service providers to give better access to finance using real-time alternative scoring.
As CTO, what do your day-to-day responsibilities look like? As CTO my job largely entails enabling people (mostly technical and product teams) to deliver value to our customers and align with business objectives. This includes prioritising product builds that will add the most value to our clients, product road-mapping, creating teams that can deliver on these products and aligning technical outputs with business objectives (and bottom lines). This touches on people enablement, product [development], partnerships and overall business strategy.
What value do your qualifications add to your work? My qualifications have given me the technical aptitude to develop software products, to contribute effectively in a team and to create product roadmaps.
