Weekly Newsletter

The government and Vodacom won almost every legal argument. The court accepted the correct legislation, accepted the share price wasn't its business, accepted that normal procurement rules didn't apply.

Microsoft's stated reason — a global restructuring — is probably the honest one. The Lagos closure in 2024 was called routine. Now Nairobi follows the same logic two years later.

The offer priced below what institutional investors had hoped for. Shares slipped on debut. The valuation landed at $7 billion, not the $8–9 billion that was being whispered.

That single number from the Reserve Bank's own research should stop anyone in their tracks. South Africans earning under R1,250 a month spend roughly 5% of their income on cash-related costs — fees, travel to distant machines, repeat…

The uncomfortable truth about Nigerian SME lending is that banks don't lack money — they lack a way to trust the borrower. Cascador's model doesn't solve that by throwing more capital at the problem.

Thirteen years of a signed agreement, three federal interventions, and the number on paper is still ₦145 per metre. The number on the ground is anywhere from ₦850 to ₦700,000.

Paystack launched Zap, its consumer savings app, while still holding only a payments licence — the kind that lets you move money, not keep it. Nigeria's central bank fined it ₦250 million for exactly that gap.

Nearly four in every ten of Nigeria's electricity customers have no meter. They get an estimated bill, dispute it, stop paying, or pay less than they owe — and the distribution companies haemorrhage money they never actually collect.

Western banks have been quietly shrinking their African books for years. J.P. Morgan is now moving the opposite direction — not with a representative office, but a licensed merchant bank that can underwrite debt, advise on deals and trade…

Standard Bank has already pushed over CNY 8 billion through CIPS, showing the renminbi corridor is real. What Ecobank adds is different in kind: a single banking relationship spanning 34 African markets at once.

Kenya's central bank already has this power over commercial banks — and has used it. Imperial Bank, Chase Bank. Now the draft National Payment System Bill, 2026, extends the same logic to payment companies.

Thirty-one per cent of Nigeria's poor population has no electricity. Nearly forty per cent lack clean cooking fuel. When those are the daily realities, a fintech app or a consumer platform isn't a solution — it's an irrelevance.

The wallet ceiling doubling to 4 million FCFA matters — but not for the 60 million average users whose balances sit around 32,000 FCFA. The real story is Article 34.

Most African e-mobility companies are still burning through investor money to prove their model works. MAX says it has already crossed into profit — and that claim, if it holds, reframes what this round actually is.

The naira depreciation and rising costs are real. But the mechanism that actually broke Baxi's economics is simpler: Nigerians stopped needing to queue at a POS terminal.

The nine-month number looks healthy. $2.49 billion, 7.8% up on last year — a real recovery signal after the collapse that bottomed out in 2024.

An IPO already subscribed three to four times over doesn't usually need more time. Yet Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission granted a 14-day extension — and the stated reason is the one worth sitting with: investors across Africa…

NIBSS just built Nigeria's national payment backbone on open-source software — and quietly secured access to the actual source code.

The drivers want a 10% commission cap. Bolt is calling for dialogue without offering a number. inDrive isn't answering questions at all.

Ethiopia joining PAPSS matters — 130 million people and one of Africa's fastest-growing economies now have a formal path into the continental payments network.

The headline names the busiest investors. The number underneath it is the one that matters: 171 startups raised between $100,000 and $1 million in the first nine months of 2026, down from 220 in the same period last year — the lowest count…