FEBRUARY 17 TO FEBRUARY 19, 2009, NAIROBI, KENYA

Aitec Africa, an event management and marketing firm with offices in Kenya and the UK, will hold a conference to discuss the banking and payment technologies available to the East African financial services sector.  Aitec Africa hopes that bank managers and customers will learn about the latest international developments in payment technologies, best practices in information technology (IT) project deployment, and current trends in customer service delivery.  The conference will be held over a three-day period at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre in Nairobi, Kenya. 

The theme for the 2009 conference is “Serving the Customer through Payment Technologies.”  The conference will cover the following topics:  how bank managers can efficiently and profitably deliver banking services to the low-income masses; whether African mobile operators should function as partners, competitors, or both; technological innovations and business model alternatives for Africa’s burgeoning mobile banking sector; return-maximization and cost-minimization of self-service banking systems; economies of scale through infrastructure sharing by microfinance institutions (MFIs); and an introduction to Islamic banking.   Aitec Africa emphasizes on their website that there will be an emphasis on case studies and that vendor product promotion will be kept to a minimum.  However, the conference will still provide kiosks for local banks to demonstrate their services and obtain customer feedback and data.  A complete schedule does not yet look to be available, but a program listing the conference’s major workshops is available online.  

The following is a selection of organizations that have sponsored the conference so far:  Paynet (Kenya), Safaricom (Kenya), SBA Technologies (USA), Postilion (USA), Clickatell (South Africa), iVeri (Kenya), Nirph (South Africa).

To attend, interested parties must pay USD 650 to register for the three-day conference (including lunch and refreshments).  A separate Islamic Banking Masterclass is also available for USD 190.  Discounts apply for multiple registrants.   For more information on the conference, please contact Helen Morony at +44-1480-880774 or email info@aitecafrica.com.   Interested parties can also propose conference presentations by emailing the same address.