NEWS
Flocash and Visa partner to promote digital capabilities for African SMEs
Visa , a global provider of digital payments , has announced that it is partnering with Flocash , Africa ’ s fastest growing fintech 2022 , to promote digital capabilities for African SMEs through digital payments , supplier solutions and access to financial services .
The first step in the partnership is the launch of Flostore , powered by a Visa digital wallet and the Flocash pan – African payment platform , which can help small businesses accept digital payments , manage supplies and access financial services across Africa .
“ Visa is committed to expanding the digitisation of payments across Africa . With partners like Flocash , our goal is to enable African businesses to access our payments ecosystem and technologies to enable them to innovatively and efficiently serve their customers . This partnership with Flocash , as well as the launch of Flostore , are important step towards achieving this goal ,” said Corine Mbiaketcha , Vice President and General Manager , East Africa , Visa . “ Flocash has grown significantly as a travel payments processor over the last few years , and we are thrilled to partner with them ,” Mbiaketcha added .
Sirak Mussie , Managing Director , Flocash , said : “ Visa is a great partner to scale Flocash ’ s pan-African payment platform and develop this critical area of African commerce that can offer enormous continent-wide economic development opportunities .”
Meta ’ s AI machine translation research helps break language barriers
Meta has announced that it has built and open sourced ‘ No Language Left Behind ’ NLLB-200 , a single AI model that is the first to translate across 200 different languages , including 55 African languages with state-of-the-art results . Meta is using the modelling techniques and learnings from the project to improve and extend translations on Facebook , Instagram , and Wikipedia .
In an effort to develop high-quality machine translation capabilities for most of the world ’ s low-resource languages , this single AI model was designed with a focus on African languages .
“ It ’ s impressive how much AI is improving all of our services . We just open-sourced an AI model we built that can translate across 200 different languages – many of which aren ’ t supported by current translation systems . We call this project No Language Left
Behind , and the AI modelling techniques we used are helping make high quality translations for languages spoken by billions of people around the world . To give a sense of the scale , the 200-language model has over 50 billion parameters , and we trained it using our new Research SuperCluster , which is one of the world ’ s fastest AI supercomputers . The advances here will enable more than 25 billion translations every day across our apps ,” said Mark Zuckerberg , CEO , Meta .
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