Nearpays, a Lagos-based fintech, has won the AI for Good Innovation Factory 2026 Grand Finale in Geneva, taking home a $20,000 cash prize and beating out finalists from 30 countries to become the competition’s overall winner. The announcement came on July 9 at the AI for Good Global Summit, organised by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), where founder Victor Daniyan pitched Nearpays’ Soft POS technology before a jury that included representatives from Amazon, Deloitte, and Qualcomm Ventures.
The win came with an unscripted twist. Musician and AI Skills Coalition advocate will.i.am surprised all three Grand Finale finalists on stage with additional prize funding on top of the competition’s official purse, a moment that briefly overshadowed the announcement itself but underscored the summit’s push to pair celebrity visibility with startup funding.
What Nearpays Actually Sells
Nearpays turns an ordinary smartphone into an NFC-enabled card payment terminal, letting small merchants accept contactless payments without buying a physical POS machine. The pitch is specifically aimed at Africa’s informal retail economy, where the upfront cost of hardware — not the absence of demand — has long kept many traders out of digital payments entirely.
The company layers an AI tax engine on top of that core payments product. It uses transaction data to automate tax filing and flag over-taxation, a problem Nearpays says disproportionately affects small businesses that lack the accounting infrastructure larger firms rely on. That dual pitch — payments acceptance plus compliance — is what distinguished Nearpays from the other finalists at the Grand Finale, according to ITU’s own framing of the company’s session.
A Second Win Building on the First
This was not Nearpays’ first podium finish this cycle. The company won the AI for Good Innovation Pitch in Johannesburg in November 2025, a regional round that earned it the right to represent Africa at the global final in Geneva. Daniyan told reporters at the time that the award reflected the company’s mission to solve local challenges through innovation, framing Nearpays’ Soft POS as proof that African teams can build technology on par with anything coming out of Silicon Valley or Europe.
The Innovation Factory itself is no small pitching contest. This cycle drew over 1,000 startup applications from 88 countries, whittled down through monthly regional rounds between September 2025 and May 2026 to 210 finalists before the four-way Grand Finale in Geneva. Nearpays’ path — regional win in Johannesburg, then global win eight months later — is the kind of trajectory ITU designed the programme to produce, and it gives the company a global media moment that few African fintech startups outside Moniepoint or Flutterwave have managed to secure this year.
The Harder Questions Ahead
A $20,000 prize and a stage moment with will.i.am generate headlines, but they do not resolve the execution questions that matter more for Nearpays’ actual business. Soft POS technology is not a novel category in Nigeria. Moniepoint, OPay, and several other players already run extensive agent and terminal networks, and Nearpays will need to show it can win merchant trust and distribution at a comparable scale rather than remaining a pitch-competition standout.
The AI tax engine raises a separate set of questions. Automating tax filing for small merchants means integrating with tax authorities’ own systems and assumptions about what counts as taxable revenue — a regulatory relationship that takes years to build in Nigeria’s still-evolving compliance environment, not months. Nearpays has not disclosed active merchant numbers, transaction volumes, or which state or federal tax bodies it has formal integrations with, details that would tell a fuller story than the award itself.
Nearpays says it plans to expand partnerships with technology firms, regulators, and financial institutions following the Geneva win, with an eye on scaling its offering to more African markets. Whether that expansion translates into merchant adoption at the volumes claimed by incumbents like Moniepoint, whose terminals reach roughly two out of three Nigerian adults, will be the real test of whether this recognition converts into market share.
