Finance & Innovation - Africa Business School

Finance & Innovation

Africa has the potential to become one of the most attractive investment destinations in the world. During the last decade, we have observed a strong shift towards high and persistent growth in many of the countries in the continent. It is important to note that the most important drivers behind this shift are increased public and private investments, fueled by an improved business environment. However, the current level of investment remains critically low in order to meet spending needs for growth factors such as infrastructure, education and technology. For the investment to contribute to sustainable development and growth in Africa, there is a need to demystify the investment landscape on the continent and center the discourse on the role of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The Finance and Innovation cluster at ABS aims to act as a launchpad for ideas that aims to tackle current problems in the African continent. In doing so, the cluster examines topics such as financial inclusion, financial literacy, and SMEs funding but also the impact of new fintech innovations.

Research Team

Abdulkader Aljandali, PhD

Dominique Jacquet, PhD

PhD candidates

Miss Basma El Fadl

Big Data and AI in Corporate Finance

The interest in using data mining in finance has grown significantly since the first emergence of data mining techniques. Text documents are important sources of information about companies. However, some of this information is implicit and is carried by variables such as the complexity and the length of the text documents. Miss El Fadl’s research uses text mining techniques on companies’ annual financial reports, in order to retrieve information from the wording complexity and the length of these reports. Her study analyses companies’ annual reports with a focus on the MENA region. The numerous specificities of this region, namely the language used for the reports and the local jargon, among other factors, will require the development of a new text mining program to capture the maximum amount of information from the reports. The relation between these text mining data and other financial corporate variables will then be studied in order to establish a structured link. The study employs proxies of numerous financial corporate factors, namely agency problems, investment growth opportunities, size, capital structure, ownership structure, profitability, and dividends.

Mrs Kenza Cherrat

Result based Finance: Evaluative Approach of operational and social efficiency

Traditional bilateral aid flow from donor countries to beneficiaries, financing inputs of social programs, has shown its limits. Inefficiencies in the leveraging the social outcome and failure in breaking the dependence loop on development. Result-based financing (RBF) is an innovative approach to social finance based on the transfer of development accountability and results from donor to recipient and where payments are based on proven impacts on local communities. The implementation structure remains challenging though, where the RBF scheme requires collaborative actors’ intervention and costly implementation with a challenge to decrease operational risks and maximize social benefits (Result for Development Institute, 2016). While heavily used in the health sector, the RBF scheme is gaining more premises in other development sectors in risky contextual environments. Kenza’s research evaluates the value chain of the RBF approach in delivering its promises in the field on a factual basis. Cost-benefit analysis and experimental approach are methods used to assess the operational and social efficiency matrices of these tools in practice.

Mrs Ghada El Boury

Green Financing for a Fair Energetic Transition

Climate change is one of, if not the main issue facing humankind over the next decade. The repercussions of global warming can be devastating if no action is taken. Energy consumption, through fossil fuels and coal, contributes greatly to CO2 and methane emissions. An emphasis on a transition to cleaner energies has informed policies and R&D efforts in recent years. The latter is contributing to decreasing the cost of renewable energies over the past decade, to the point where the cost of new capacity is now cheaper for renewables (solar or wind) than fossil fuel-fired. The generated prices are also below the operating costs alone of existing coal-fired power plants. Mrs El Boury’s research attempts to answer the following questions: The preliminary observation of the context leads to several research questions, among them:

•What financial solutions are needed to accompany African countries during the transition?
•How can we incentivize developed countries to respect their financial commitments toward developing countries?
•What financial packaging can be done to insure that developing countries with renewable energy resources can profit from investment from developed countries and export energy to them at a fair price?
•The COP26 at Glasgow put in place rules about carbon trading which will lead to a boom in the trading of emission credits. How to integrate fairly carbon emission trading into investment?

PhD prospects:

The Finance cluster welcomes PhD prospects who are interested in pursuing research in the following areas:

Applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the Financial Industry

Blockchain applications in Trade and Finance with a focus on Africa

Entrepreneurship, Financing, and the effect of SMEs on African Economies

ESG investing, Green Bonds and FinTech applications in Morocco

Research projects and related publications

The dramatic surge of interest in FinTech over the past few years has highlighted the need for a better understanding of the value of technological innovations. In line with this reasoning, FinTech has emerged as a mechanism that enables banking and non-banking institutions to cut their costs, enhance the quality of their services and create a much more resilient and diverse financial environment. This FinTech development, which is supported by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation allows FinTech adopters to enter different segments of the financial services industry. Despite the broad application of FinTech, little academic research has explored the development of this new wave of technological innovations.

Current projects

Recent publications

Aljandali, A. and A. Benamraoui (2020)

“Fintech: A Review of Recent Developments and Prospects” Journal of the Italian Bankers Association, Bancaria. 12, pp. 85-95. Available at [FinTech Innovations:
A Review of the Recent Developments and Prospects (bancaria.it)]

Kallandranis, C., P. Kalantonis and A. Aljandali(2020)

“Corporate Fixed Investment and Internal Liquidity: Evidence from Greek Listed Companies” Corporate Governance and Sustainability Review, 4(2), 68-76. Available at [Corporate fixed investment and internal liquidity: (…) (virtusinterpress.org)]

Aljandali, A. and C. Kallandranis (2020)

“Exchange rate modelling in the development community using the ARDL cointegration approach: The case of emerging markets” Journal of Risk Governance and Control:
Financial Markets & Institutions, 10(2), pp. 53-70. Available at [(PDF) Exchange rate modelling in the development community using the ARDL cointegration approach: The case of emerging markets (researchgate.net)]