How Fintech and Software start ups will get the big clients in 2024

While South Africa's economic outlook may be murky, so many fintech and software startups are positive they will close large corporate clients in 2024. But obtaining these types of deals takes more than just technical acumen. What South African software suppliers need to think about

1. How cloud-hosted Tech survives due to Resilience

Although organizations face less downtime due to cloud-based applications, there is still the misnomer about their resilience. While cloud providers secure the infrastructure, application and data security are primarily managed by you.

The Shared Responsibility Model - It is imperative you get familiar with this model. Your customers want to know how you mitigate access interruptions for applications and data.

Dealing With Risk Exposure: A simple search for a Fortinet report showed that 95% of enterprises using public clouds operate under concern about the risk exposure. Show your willingness to take risks by providing solid backup solutions, such as software escrow.

2. Legal Compliance (International and Local)

Third party software is the cornerstone of big corporations for most important operations. Outages can yield service failures or regulatory missteps. A whole raft of tighter regulation has been proposed by financial regulators around the world.

Global Regulations - such as PRA SS2/21 in the UK, and DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) adopted by EU.

South African Regulations: The Financial Services Conduct Authority and Prudential Authority's Joint Communication 4 of 2023 which lists the mandatory principles for IT governance and risk management applicable to financial institutions. To counter this, maintenance must be performed on the software by escrow agents (escrows) as well that can only provide restoration of applications in case services were halted.

Competitive Edge over Compliance

Proactive software escrow solutions that adhere to changing regulatory norms can give an edge to other players in the market. This both gives potential clients assurance, and strengthens you value proposition which could lead to additional funding.

In 2024 and beyond, this will be a differentiator that makes or breaks South African startups when they seek large corporate clients - in energy as well as other sectors.