The Venture lab at The American University in Cairo (AUC Venture Lab), the Africa-focused university-based start-up accelerator, and banking software company Temenos have announced their intention to collaborate and strengthen Cairo's FinTech ecosystem.

Temenos will provide start-ups suing the accelerator with access to a sandbox service, a non-production cloud-based version of Temenos T24 core banking system.

"It will be used by the startups to integrate their solutions with banking data and functionality as well as to test them for scalability and robustness. They will also be able to plug into the 11 major financial institutions in Egypt already running Temenos T24 according to Temenos and AUC Venture Lab," reads a statement issued by the company.

Jean-Paul Mergeai, Regional Director Temenos Middle East & Africa at Temenos said, "The Egyptian market is currently in an ideal position to take advantage of a rich FinTech ecosystem that will help drive digital transformation across the banking industry."

Ayman Ismail, Abdul Latif Jameel Endowed Chair of Entrepreneurship at AUC's School of Business and Director of AUC Venture Lab says the emerging FinTech space in Egypt has the potential to transform the industry and expand access to financial services in one of the largest regional markets.

"At AUC Venture Lab, we understand the technological challenges that FinTech start-ups face. Our partnership with Temenos responds to this challenge by offering our start-ups an exclusive opportunity to build their products on the Temenos platform and to accelerate their development cycle. This contributes to faster rollout of new innovative products and services to the Egyptian market."

The partners envisage that the AUC Venture Lab will play host to Temenos events, such as the upcoming "Meet the Marketplace" in October 2018, where global FinTechs and existing members of Temenos Marketplace will be invited to showcase and demo their solutions to a number of Egyptian financial institutions.