Digital advertising firm launches innovation lab to support tech-preneurs

Squad Digital General Manager Manish Sardana addresses developers at the first Squad Labs Hackathon

Squad Digital, Sub-Saharan Africa’s leading digital advertising firm, has today launched an innovation lab that is aimed at spurring technological growth through incubation and research in Kenya. 

Dubbed Squad Labs, the lab will have dedicated research and development teams responsible for creating innovative products and is currently working with over 30 developers in in Kenya.

 “We want to drive cutting-edge innovation in the digital marketing space in Kenya and Africa and we will be investing heavily in this sector to incubate products in Customer Relationship Marketing, social media, Wearable Technologies and Content Marketing areas,” noted Squad Digital General Manager, Manish Sardana.

Mr. Sardana: “Squad Labs will seek to leverage Kenya’s creative minds and resources in new innovative ways and will provide a platform to source, develop, evaluate, test and eventually launch new digital offerings and technologies to the market.” 

The flagship product from Squad Labs is a Social Banking Platform that allows consumers to open bank accounts online on social media platform - Facebook with phase two of the Social banking innovation allowing the bank’s customers to view their bank statements and even make transfer funds. 

“Social Banking revolutionizes the way the Kenyan youth interact with the Banking system. The over 5 million Facebook users will now be able to manage their banking needs from the convenience of their Facebook pages”, said Mr. Sardana.

“Squad Labs is expected to impact the country by developing practical and cost effective solutions that focus on consumer trends and we will work with techprenuers to generate new ideas that will move quickly from concept to reality.

This comes at a time when the digital advertising firm  recently organized a Hackathon , a challenge for its technology team to develop an online Influencer Management Platform using  Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) from Twitter to rate influencers based on their followers and subject matter expertise. The product called “Twitulence” will be rolled out soon in the market.

Squad Labs is also working to roll out a Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) solution, called the Lead Management System that will help sales organizations optimize their campaign spends and manage leads from various campaigns. 

Squad Labs will look at teaming up with Kenya’s and indeed global technology giants to evaluate additional strategic alliances in the future, through the Squad Lab program.