Brilliance Awards Winners 2022

Awarded to Attijariwafa Bank, Morocco

In 2022, Morocco’s largest banking group executed a massive cloud-native transformation of its retail and corporate banking infrastructure. They successfully migrated millions of users to their upgraded digital web and mobile platforms, integrating automated credit scoring and instant digital account opening. This massive structural overhaul drove unprecedented financial inclusion across North and West Africa, proving that legacy African financial institutions could successfully operate with the agility of pure fintechs.

Shintaro Yamada, Founder & CEO of Mercari, Japan

In 2022, Yamada steered Mercari through an exceptional digital growth phase by aggressively expanding its integrated fintech ecosystem, Merpay, and its dedicated blockchain unit, Mercoin. Under his executive direction, Mercari crossed 30 million monthly active users by shifting from a simple peer-to-peer marketplace app into a frictionless digital financial environment. By embedding instantaneous digital point-of-sale financing and automated crypto-trading features directly into the core app, his product-led growth strategy allowed millions of Japanese consumers to transact seamlessly under a unified digital space without ever leaving the ecosystem.

Awarded to Wave Mobile Money, Senegal

In April 2022, Wave made history by becoming the very first non-bank, non-telecom fintech in West Africa to be officially granted a regional E-money license by the BCEAO Central Bank. Wave won the award for utilizing this digital-first regulatory freedom to build independent payment infrastructures. Bypassing expensive telecom networks with their lean, 1%-flat-fee app, they onboarded millions of unbanked citizens, driving massive regional financial inclusion.

Awarded to Cancer Research, UK

Cancer Research UK transformed charitable fundraising by deploying an agile, data-driven paid search and social optimization strategy during key giving seasons. The non-profit utilized advanced audience segmentation to deliver highly personalized donation journeys to micro-targeted historical donor cohorts. By optimizing their donation landing pages through relentless A/B testing, they achieved record-breaking digital conversion rates and low acquisition costs. This exceptional performance marketing proved that non-profit budgets can achieve commercial-level efficiency when backed by analytics.

Awarded to EDP Portugal

EDP Portugal introduced clean energy consumer innovation by deploying an interactive, AI-driven digital web dashboard for household energy optimization across Iberia. Their software used customer consumption tracking to feed real-time usage data and personalized saving insights back to users via an app interface. By turning raw operational metrics into actionable, customer-facing visual data, they maximized the household efficiency of wind and solar assets. This deployment proved how traditional energy companies can use cloud platforms to accelerate transition goals.

Awarded to the Prado Museum, Spain

The Prado Museum expanded cultural access by developing an immersive digital gallery that featured hyper-high-resolution, interactive artwork displays. Remote users could explore micro-details of historic paintings while listening to curated, dynamic audio narratives that adapted to their navigation choices. By combining deep historical archival work with clean web design, they successfully engaged a global audience of younger art enthusiasts. This creative framework demonstrated how legacy institutions can use digital spaces to preserve and share history.