Buspreneur interview with Cedric Franz

Cedric Franz has 20 years of experience in software architecture and development in the financial sector. He currently works for Visa and leads a team of 80 who develop products for Visa’s emerging market clientele.

1. Who are you? Describe yourself in 3 sentences.
   A software developer at heart, but love all technology. I am always learning new skills and building stuff, currently I am experimenting with quadcopters. Spending time with my family, keeping fit and doing sport is very important to me. I enjoy mountain biking and windsurfing.
2. What do you expect from your participation on the bus?
   I will probably be one of the older people on the bus and hope to share my knowledge and expertise with everyone else. I particularly have a lot of experience in building mobile applications and deploying them into Africa. I am hoping to build networks with entrepreneurs and help them kick-start their projects.
3. Why Africa? Why now?
   I was born in Paarl, close to Cape Town and I love Africa. It is extremely important to me to give back and uplift society. I feel I have a lot of know how and expertise to be able build something really useful for society.
4. What is your area of expertise — mobile development, healthcare, or the energy sector? Please talk a little bit about how you gained this expertise…
   I have worked as a software developer and software architect for over 20 years mostly in the financial sector, but also healthcare and insurance. The majority of this time was leading the development of the Fundamo Mobile Money Platform. This platform is now deployed in over 20 emerging market countries providing financial services to formerly unbanked people. I currently work at Visa heading up a development team of over 80 people building products for Visa in emerging markets.
5. Please share an idea for a technology (mobile, health, energy) that can solve a problem/s local to the South African region.
   Crime is a big problem in South Africa and I have a clever idea to get the community to become involved and to help fight crime by using mobile technology. Energy specifically for lighting and recharging is also a big problem in Africa. I have some ideas for a potential solution.
6. Everyone has a special story. What is yours?
   I love building things. I built a wind turbine from scratch (except the blades), currently I am building quadcopters and other multi-rotors unmanned drones. I have also built a number of smaller projects on RaspberryPi and Arduino.
7. Are you sponsoring yourself or do you have sponsors? Please tell us about your sponsors…
   I am being sponsored by the company that I work for. I work for Visa Inc., the card processing company.