1. Is the business environment in Kenya conducive for FinTech business?
Yes Certainly - Disruption as it turns out, is as much a form of social evolution as it is of technological improvements. We are all evolving socially and otherwise.
3. Have banks finally caught on FinTech with their solutions?
I think Banks are catching up on this technology as they continue to understand it better. Its however quite clear banks will lead on this and not the Fintechs as much touted.
4. How will bitcoins & block chain technology affect the market?
When you speak with someone in the Bitcoin community, their is only one thing mentioned - as was during the dot. come era. In every conversation "Bitcoin is here and will change everything". What all those Crypto-pundits fail to remember or read about is at the beginning of the dot.com boom there were Netscape, Yahoo, AOL, Lycos Alsta Vista etc. the outcome yielded different winners: Amazon Google, Salesforce etc.
Again, as with dot.com there is something the larger public don't understand. While the media mulls over Bitcoin and and gives credence to a slew of people proclaiming a "decentralised network that no one will own" to a naive public and convincing them to dump millions into "ICO", there is something else happening. Consider FAAMG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google) do you think its a coincidence they are major deployments for many Blockchain networks?
As with previous games the winners are already taking in massive rewards because they are already hooked into an existing IT and Banking Infrastructure. Currently investments are only flowing into Blockchain infrastructure that must be enterprise grade. Same as the Internet didn't make IT departments irrelevant, Blockchain will not replace IT departments. What will change is the speed and types of skillset needed in it. There will be no immediate shift to everything Blockchain - there will be long periods of co-existing and integration with existing IT systems. However Blockchain will lead to a strong surge in cloud adoption.
The consequence of Blockchain among consumers will be most felt in Infrastructure were developments relating to Identity, Privacy and Security are taking shape.
I don't think Bitcoin has a future