Ctrl wins Best Financial Solution at the 2018 MTN Business App of the Year Awards

Some good news to share: Ctrl, the insurtech startup where I'm CTO, won Best Financial Solution at the 2018 MTN Business App of the Year Awards.

The awards are in their seventh year and are one of the bigger stages for South African apps, with categories ranging from health and education to agriculture and gaming. Being picked in the financial category, alongside some very strong entrants, is a big deal for a team our size.

What Ctrl does

Ctrl sets out to make insurance simpler. Instead of phoning around and filling in the same forms over and over, you get and compare insurance quotes from your phone, and keep track of your cover in one place. Insurance is not an industry known for a great user experience, so there is a lot of room to do better.

Why it matters to us

We're still early, and the app was in testing when we entered. Recognition at this stage is a strong signal that the problem we're solving resonates, and it's a nice boost for the team after a lot of late nights.

From the technical side, a lot of the work this year went into building a platform we can trust with people's personal and financial data: cloud infrastructure, security, and the plumbing that ties our services together. I wrote about part of that stack in Firebase and AWS, match made in heaven.

Thanks to MTN Business and the judges, and congratulations to the other winners. See the full list on IT News Africa.