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Monday 09:00 - 17:00 Tuesday 09:00 - 17:30 Wednesday 09:00 - 17:00 Thursday 09:00 - 17:00 Friday 09:00 - 17:00 Saturday 09:00 - 17:00 Sunday 09:00 - 05:00

http://www.innovationcity.co.za/

Innovation City Cape Town, Darter Studios, Longkloof, Darter Road, Cape Town (2026)

30/04/2026

📢 NEW EVENT ALERT!!!

Who actually gets access to the financial system and who doesn’t?

That question is sitting underneath a lot of what’s happening in fintech right now.

As fraud gets more sophisticated and regulation struggles to keep up, identity is no longer just a compliance step - it’s the gateway to participation.

Next up at Innovation City Cape Town, in partnership with :
“The Great Unbanking Debate: Identity, Access & Trust in African Markets”

A curated, high-signal room of fintech operators, banks, and platform builders getting into what’s actually breaking, and what it takes to scale without locking out legitimate users.

No fluff. Just the realities:
💡 Where identity systems are failing
💡 How trust is being built in real time
💡 What inclusion actually looks like at scale

If you’re building in fintech, platforms, or anything that depends on trust at scale, this is one to be in the room for!

Request to join
🔗Link in bio

24/04/2026

🥂 Bubbly, Networking, and a Reality Check on AI

Our recent session, “Bots and Bubbles: How AI Is Rewiring Financial Services,” hosted by Finance Isle of Man at Innovation City Cape Town, moved past the hype to look at the actual infrastructure of the continent’s economy.

We started the evening with a glass of bubbly and some great networking, but the conversation quickly turned to the “engine room” of finance.

The biggest takeaway? AI is a revolution, not an evolution. As our panel pointed out, trying to fit AI into legacy systems is like trying to make a horse run faster when the automobile has already arrived. Sometimes, you have to obliterate the old to build the new.

💡 4 Key Insights from the Room:

🌍 The African Complexity: Unlike Brazil or India with single regulators, Africa’s 1.4 billion people are spread across 54 countries. Navigating this regulatory fragmentation is the ultimate AI challenge.

🏗️ Infrastructure is Non-Negotiable: We can’t just talk about models; we have to talk about compute power. Building local data centers is the only way to move from “consuming” AI to “building” it.

🔒 Policy as a Competitive Edge: The winners won’t be the companies rushing blindly into AI, but those who are “cautiously optimistic,” defining strict policies on data cleanliness and model ethics.

🛡️ The Speed of Risk: Traditional 2-day security patching is dead. AI-powered threats move instantly, meaning our defense systems must now be as fast as the attackers.

🎤 The Panel
A massive thank you to all who attended, especially our experts Mpho Sadiki (), Thalia Pillay (Orca Fraud) and amazing moderator Mladen Čolić ( Africa), for the candid “Food for Thought!”

17/04/2026

🚀 Unlocking SA’s Invisible Economy: Key Takeaways

South Africa’s financial landscape is shifting, and the “invisible economy” is finally becoming visible.

We recently hosted a powerhouse session, “Financial Inclusion 2.0: Unlocking SA’s Invisible Economy,” where we dove deep into how fintech innovation, alternative data, and a retail-led banking revolution are redrawing the lines of financial access.

A massive thank you to our expert panel for their sharp insights:
Benito Mable (CEO, )
Idan Jaan (Co-Founder & COO, )
Patrick Postrehovsky (GM, Zazu)
Superbly led by Jaco Van Jaarsveldt (Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer, SA)

And of course, thank you to everyone who attended and contributed to the vibrant discussion!

➡️ Here are our 5 Game-Changing Insights from the Session:

1. The MSME Funding Gap is a Crisis 📉  85% of applicants earn under R1M. Current regulations make them “too complex” for big banks, leaving the economy’s backbone underserved. 
2. Retailers are the New Banking Giants 🛒 Retailers and agile players are winning. Their real-time point-of-sale and loyalty data beats outdated credit reports. 
3. From “Thin-File” to “Data-Rich” 📊 Transaction history is the new gold standard. 13 months of on-time subscriptions prove reliability better than a traditional score. 
4. The Death of Vehicle Ownership? 🚗 The youth are ditching 72-month loans for mobility subscriptions. Freedom of access is officially replacing the “pride of ownership.” 
5. Open Banking: The 5-Year Lag 🔓 We need standardised APIs. To drive inclusion, we must turn fragmented data into seamless financial intelligence.

The Bottom Line: Financial inclusion is about recognising the value in existing behaviour. The data is there—we just need the tools to use it. 💡

14/04/2026

🚨 NEW EVENT ALERT 📢

Bots and Bubbles: How AI Is Rewiring Financial Services
📍 Innovation City Cape Town
🗓️ 23 April | 17h30–19h00
💡 Brought to you by

AI isn’t the future of finance - it’s the current infrastructure! 🤖

From fraud detection to payment flows, machine learning has moved out of the lab and into the stack.

Join us and Finance Isle of Man for a candid “Food for Thought” panel on how AI is practically reshaping risk, trust, and digital security.

We’ll interrogate where AI is already embedded beyond the pilot phase, how risk models are evolving, and the critical relationship between regulation and trust. This session is designed for fintech leaders and policymakers to pinpoint what to prioritize as AI becomes the backbone of digital commerce.

…and yes, there will be complimentary networking bubbly! 🥂

Featuring:
🎤 Mpho Sadiki – MD for Merchant Services, Africa: Payfast by Network
🎤 Thalia Pillay – Co-Founder: Orca Fraud
🎤 Mladen Colic – Head of FinTech: TransUnion Africa

🎟️ Seats are limited.
🔗Link in bio

31/03/2026

🚨 New Event Alert 📢

Financial Inclusion 2.0: Unlocking SA’s Invisible Economy

📅 Thursday 16 April 2026
⏰ 13:00 – 14:30
📍 Innovation City Cape Town

The old gatekeeper model of SA finance is breaking. ⛓️💥

For too long, if you didn’t have the assets, you didn’t have the access.
We’re bringing together the innovators reshaping the “access stack” at Innovation City. Led by Experian South Africa, this conversation moves past the hype to look at what’s actually changing on the ground.

Featuring:
👤 Jaco van Jaarsveld ( )
👤 Idan Jaan
👤 Zazu SA’s Patrick Postrehovsky

The Focus:
📉 Asset-light financial products
📊 Behavioral data vs. traditional collateral
🚀 New entry points into the SA economy

This is a working room for founders, operators, and investors who want to understand where the next wave of opportunity is emerging.

If you’re building in fintech, banking, credit-tech, or policy — this is where you need to be. 📍

🎟️ Secure your seat
Link in Bio.

25/03/2026

What is your data actually worth?

That’s the question we unpacked at our “Data & Donuts: Can You Make a Buck With Your Data?” event at Innovation City in collaboration with .

And the answer is: it depends far less on how much data you have, and far more on how it’s structured, how often it updates, and what it can be used for.

A few takeaways that stayed with us:

⚡ You can’t retrofit consent
If you want to monetise data, the groundwork needs to be laid from day one. Privacy, disclosures, and opt-in mechanisms aren’t admin, they’re foundational.

🔐 Collaboration doesn’t mean exposure
Privacy-preserving technologies now make it possible to collaborate on data without sharing identities, opening up entirely new use cases.

🔗 Match keys matter
If your data can’t connect to other datasets, it has limited commercial value. Think carefully about what identifiers you collect.

⚡ Frequency drives value
Data that updates often carries more signal, which is why retail and telco datasets are so powerful.

🚫 Be careful with exclusivity
If someone wants exclusive access to your data, it’s a sign it’s valuable. Don’t give that away too early!

📊 Value comes from use cases
Data doesn’t have a fixed price. Its value is determined by how many real-world problems it can solve.

A big thank you to Anton Grutzmacher from Omnisient - Collaborative Consumer Intelligence and Andea du Toit from for a thoughtful and practical conversation!

And to everyone who joined - the questions were sharp, grounded, and exactly what these sessions are designed for - thank you!

23/03/2026

🚨 NEW EVENT ALERT!!!

➡️ Web in Travel Africa 2026: The Next 20
📅 Thursday 9 April 2026
⏰ 08:00 – 18:00
📍 Innovation City Cape Town

The future of travel isn’t being predicted. It’s being built. ✈️

On Thursday 9 April, WiT Africa comes to Innovation City — bringing together global and African leaders shaping how travel is discovered, bought, and experienced.

This is not a trends recap. It’s a working room of founders, operators, and builders sharing what’s actually changing on the ground across AI, distribution, payments, platforms, and experiences.

🎤Featurimg speakers from: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .za , , , , ,

If you’re building in travel, fintech, platforms, or AI — this is where you need to be.

🎟️ Secure your seat.
🔗 Link in bio

20/03/2026

What it actually takes to build a product-led brand that scales. 🧦

At Innovation City this week, we hosted () in conversation with ’s Tshego Ramatlo and Tarryn Pinchen.

Here’s what stayed with us:

⚡ Speed > perfection
Growth slows when decisions stack up. The best teams move within clear parameters and fix fast. Waiting kills momentum.

🧦 Focus is a strategy
VERSUS is still overwhelmingly a socks business. Not everything needs to become a range. Depth beats distraction.

🏠 Start when downside is low
Low overheads = more room to experiment, learn, and reinvest. Early structure matters more than early scale.

🏃 Build community early
Before it was “a strategy”, it was five people running together. Community compounds, but only if you start before you need it.

🏪 Retail ≠ success
Getting into stores is step one. Sell-through is what keeps you there. Demand has to be built outside the shelf.

🌍 Know when to change suppliers
Loyalty is good. Growth is better. If your partners can’t scale with you, you need to move.

🎯 Win your home market first
Going global sounds good. Starting from zero in a new market is hard. Local dominance gives you leverage.

📊 Make the number visible
Turnover as a shared target. Everyone aligned. Everyone accountable.

🔄 Turn constraints to into assets
When expos disappeared during COVID, they launched virtual runs instead, building a 16,000-person database that continues to deliver value.

🔥 Don’t be the bottleneck
If your team can do it better, step back. Founders slow things down more than they think.

The pattern is clear:
➡️ Simple product.
➡️ Clear decisions.
➡️ Relentless consistency.

That’s how brands actually scale!

Thank you to our speakers and everyone who attended!

17/03/2026

Attention is the new global currency! 💎

Digital Mastery: The Attention Economy proved that when you curate the right disruptors in the right space, the insights are unparalleled. ⚡️

From bespoke masterclasses to high-stakes networking, we provided the blueprint for cutting through the noise.

The catalyst? The environment. At Innovation City, we don’t just “host” events; we architect the future of industry. 🦾

The reality: if you aren’t earning the market’s time, you’ve already lost it⏳

Host your next event at Innovation City.
Link in our bio 🌐

16/03/2026

NEW EVENT ALERT!!!
➡️ Data & Donuts: Can You Make a Buck With Your Data?
📅 Tuesday 24 March
⏰ 1pm - 2:30pm
🎤 Anton Grutzmacher & Andea du Toit

Has it ever occurred to you: Before you build the product, scale the platform, or train the model; what data should you actually be collecting?

Data is fast becoming one of the most valuable assets inside modern companies. Yet many founders still treat it as something their systems produce rather than something their business intentionally captures, structures, and builds value from.

On 24 March at Innovation City, we’re hosting the next session in our Food for Thought series in partnership with Finance Isle of Man, exploring how founders can start treating data as a core business asset from day one!

Joining us:
• Anton Grutzmacher, Co-Founder & CRO, Omnisient - Collaborative Consumer Intelligence, in coversation with Andea du Toit, Senior Associate, Dommisse Attorneys Inc

Together they’ll unpack questions founders should be asking much earlier:
• What data should your company be collecting from the start?
• When does data become a real business asset?
• What makes a dataset commercially valuable?
• How do governance, IP, and structuring decisions affect valuation?
• Where does data collaboration create competitive advantage?

If you’re building a tech-enabled company, your data strategy will shape far more than your product - it can influence valuation, defensibility, and long-term scale.

Join us for a founder-first conversation over a free donut... and data! 🍩

🎟 Seats are limited

📊

Innovation City Cape Town

30/04/2026

24/04/2026

17/04/2026

14/04/2026

31/03/2026

25/03/2026

23/03/2026

20/03/2026

17/03/2026

16/03/2026

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Monday	09:00 - 17:00
Tuesday	09:00 - 17:30
Wednesday	09:00 - 17:00
Thursday	09:00 - 17:00
Friday	09:00 - 17:00
Saturday	09:00 - 17:00
Sunday	09:00 - 05:00