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Quick Fire is TechCabal’s weekly column featuring executives, founders, and operators discussing the decisions, industry shifts, and contrarian ideas driving Africa’s technology and business landscape. This week: Mohammed Bashir Yunusa on non-interest commerce, why trust matters more than technology at the start of any financial innovation, and why the next decade of banking will not be won by branch count. Mohammed Bashir Yunusa is a banking executive with over 15 years of experience driving growth, transformation, and value creation across the financial services industry. His expertise spans business strategy, digital banking, commerce, innovative finance, investment and deal structuring, corporate finance, and non-interest banking. As Divisional Head, Digital Banking & Commerce at The Alternative Bank, Yunusa provides strategic leadership for the Bank’s digital banking, commerce, product management, and ecosystem partnerships. He focuses on shaping growth strategies, developing customer-centric solutions, and creating sustainable value through technology, strategic partnerships, and forward-looking business models. Throughout his career, he has led transformative initiatives across business strategy, product development, digital banking, commerce, and innovative finance. His experience also encompasses investment and deal structuring, where he has advised on strategic transactions, financing models, and partnerships across multiple sectors of the economy. His approach combines commercial insight with disciplined financial structuring to deliver sustainable outcomes for institutions and businesses. His leadership has contributed to the development of pioneering financial products, digital platforms, and business models, including Nigeria’s first credit-based e-commerce platform. By combining technology, innovative finance, and commercial strategy, he has consistently unlocked new markets, enhanced customer experiences, and delivered sustainable growth. Yunusa holds a Global Executive MBA from IESE Business School, a Postgraduate Diploma in Strategy and Innovation from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, a Master of Science in Strategic Planning from Heriot Watt University, and a Bachelor of Science (Hons.) in Business Administration (Finance) from Ahmadu Bello University, where he also graduated with distinction in Accounting. He believes finance is at its most powerful when it expands opportunity, enables enterprise, and creates shared prosperity. His work is guided by a commitment to building institutions that combine commercial excellence with innovation to deliver lasting economic and societal impact. Explain your job to a five-year-old. I help people save, spend, borrow, and grow their money in smarter ways. My team builds the tools that make banking simple, fast, and useful, so people can focus on living their lives while money quietly works for them. Non-interest banking removes the tool most digital lenders build credit products around: interest. How do you build a credit-based commerce platform without it? You stop thinking about lending and start thinking about trade. In non-interest banking, every transaction must be backed by a genuine commercial activity that forces you to build around assets, partnerships, and real economic value, not risk-priced through interest. Our job isn’t to replicate conventional banking. It’s to build better commercial models where customers gain access to goods and services, merchants increase sales, and the bank earns from facilitating genuine trade. Done well, everyone wins. You helped build Nigeria’s first credit-based e-commerce platform. What almost killed it before it worked? The technology wasn’t the difficult part. Behaviour was. We assumed customers wanted credit. What they actually wanted was confidence: that delivery would happen, that repayment would be simple, and that the product would genuinely improve their lives. The lesson: innovation succeeds when it solves a trust problem before it solves a technology problem. Inside a bank, where do the digital banking team and the commerce team actually disagree? Digital teams optimise experiences. Commerce teams optimise economics. Digital wants fewer clicks; commerce wants higher lifetime value. Digital celebrates user growth; commerce asks whether those users are profitable. The best organisations make customer experience and commercial sustainability improve together, not one at the other’s expense. In bank-fintech-merchant partnerships, who holds the leverage, and has that shifted in the last few years? Leverage belongs to whoever owns the customer relationship. A few years ago, fintechs had the advantage because they moved faster. Today, banks have become significantly more digital, merchants more sophisticated, and customers expect integrated experiences. The future belongs to partnerships where everyone contributes something unique—not to whoever tries to own everything. What’s a deal or partnership you walked away from that looked good on paper, both in your career and in your role overseeing a division at The Alternative Bank? I came across a transaction recently that looked incredibly attractive on paper. It promised strong returns and could have worked well for the first few deals. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realised it wasn’t the kind of business I want to build. It relied too heavily on today’s market conditions, today’s financing model, and today’s technology. As those evolve, so does its value proposition. So I walked away. I’ve become less interested in opportunities that make money today and more interested in building businesses that will still matter decades from now. Businesses that adapt, compound, and create value long after we’re gone. Short-term wins are exciting. Enduring institutions are far more rewarding. Your background is in deal structuring and corporate finance. What’s the real tension between building at product speed and structuring it at the speed finance—and money—is supposed to move? Innovation rewards speed; finance rewards discipline, and the mistake is believing you have to choose one. Good organisations build governance into the product development process, so risk management becomes an accelerator rather than a brake. Moving fast without discipline creates expensive mistakes. Moving perfectly but too slowly creates missed opportunities. What’s the biggest risk in Nigerian digital banking right now that isn’t being talked about enough? Everyone is competing for users. Very few are building sustainable economics. Customer acquisition has become relatively easy. Building profitable, engaged, long-term relationships is much harder. The institutions that survive will be the ones that understand lifetime value, not just download numbers. What’s a decision you made that was commercially right but took years to be proven right? Investing heavily in ecosystems instead of individual products. Products can be
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Kenya has given licenced crypto exchanges and other virtual asset companies a formal legal right to challenge regulatory decisions, one of the most significant additions to the country’s finalised cryptocurrency regulations. Under the finalised Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) Regulations, exchanges, wallet providers, token issuance platforms, stablecoin issuers, and other virtual asset firms can appeal licence refusals, suspensions, revocations, and other regulatory sanctions imposed by the relevant authorities. “A person aggrieved by any decision of the relevant regulatory authority under these Regulations may appeal against that decision in accordance with section 43 of the Act,” the National Treasury said in the policy. The appeals provision is particularly significant because the same regulations substantially expand the government’s enforcement powers. Regulators may reject licence applications, suspend or revoke licences, impose administrative sanctions, intervene in the management of a provider and appoint statutory managers to take control of customer assets under specified circumstances. The regulations also establish a legal framework for freezing and seizing virtual assets linked to suspected financial crime. Subject to court approval, investigators may obtain access to hardware wallets, seed phrases, and other devices necessary to secure digital assets under investigation. The appeals mechanism allows exchanges, wallet providers, token issuance platforms, and stablecoin issuers to challenge regulatory actions that could materially affect their operations in Kenya. At the same time, the regulations require enforcement authorities to protect customers who are not connected to the alleged wrongdoing, ensuring that freezing or seizure orders target specific accounts or virtual assets rather than all customer assets held by a platform. “A freezing or seizure order issued under this Part shall… target specific consumer accounts or specific virtual assets held in custody by the licensee; make provision for the licencee to seek clarification or variation of the order where compliance would affect assets of uninvolved consumers,” the policy read. The provision marks an important change from the draft regulations published in March, which did not contain an explicit statutory appeals mechanism for affected virtual asset service providers. The final gazetted regulations therefore introduce a clearer procedural safeguard even as Kenya strengthens oversight of the sector. The changes modestly rebalance a framework that remains heavily weighted toward enforcement. Authorities retain broad powers to inspect providers, require records, freeze assets and intervene in a firm’s operations where customer assets are considered at risk. For international exchanges evaluating the Kenyan market, the appeals mechanism provides an additional layer of regulatory certainty. Although regulators retain the authority to suspend or revoke licences, affected firms now have a clearly defined legal process through which they may challenge those decisions under the Virtual Asset Service Providers Act, 2025. Taken together, the regulations signal Kenya’s attempt to build a more mature regulatory framework for digital assets—combining stronger oversight of crypto businesses with clearer procedural protections for licenced firms subject to enforcement action. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders, and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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This article draws from my conversation with Ivana Heijnen in Episode 7 of the Voices and Visions podcast, which explores the people and ideas shaping Africa’s innovation economy. Across much of Africa, companies are becoming larger, richer, and more influential. The newsrooms expected to scrutinise them are moving in the opposite direction. I found myself returning to this contradiction during the seventh episode of Voices and Visions, a podcast hosted by Ivana Heijnen about the people shaping Africa’s tech and business ecosystems. I have always believed that journalism begins with caring about people, systems, and whether they work as they should. A reporter’s responsibility is not merely to describe events. It is to examine who is exploiting whom, which institutions are failing, and who benefits when they do. “There’s that surveillance role of a journalist,” I told Heijnen. “You scrutinise who is stealing from whom, what is going on well, what is not working as it is supposed to, and give people solutions to some of these things.” That role is becoming harder to perform. African newsrooms are operating under severe financial pressure. Advertising revenue has shifted to global tech platforms such as Facebook, Google, and X. Print circulation has declined, while audiences increasingly expect news to be free. Media organisations have responded by imposing hiring freezes, laying off staff, and shrinking editorial budgets. Reporters are expected to produce more stories across more platforms with fewer resources. Investigative journalism is particularly vulnerable. It is expensive, slow, and legally risky. A reporter may spend weeks pursuing a story that generates no immediate revenue and may never be published. By contrast, a sponsored event or corporate announcement can generate income and be turned into multiple pieces of multimedia content within hours. While this is now being presented as a media business problem, it is also a big accountability crisis. “Media has a huge role,” I said during the conversation. “Surveillance. We need to scrutinise everything that is in the public. We need to hold everyone to account, and that is telling the story as it is.” But watchdog journalism cannot survive on responsibility alone. It requires reporters, editors, lawyers, travel budgets, data, and institutions willing to withstand commercial and political pressure. As those resources disappear, the people and companies requiring the greatest scrutiny gain more room to shape the stories told about them. Powerful companies, weaker newsrooms Large companies have resources that most African publications currently do not. They retain communications advisers, lawyers, lobbyists, and public relations agencies. They cultivate relationships with editors, sponsor industry events, and buy advertising across multiple platforms. None of those activities is inherently improper. Companies have a legitimate interest in explaining what they do. The problem arises when their capacity to influence the public narrative exceeds the media’s capacity to interrogate it. Some of the companies journalists cover are also among the biggest sources of advertising revenue. Their executives may have close relationships with media owners. In some countries, the people who possess political or commercial power also directly own the outlets expected to scrutinise them. “Some of these people who have this power also own the media outlets,” I told Heijnen. “They just want reporters to rejig whatever they want to churn out.” A financially secure newsroom can resist some of that pressure. A struggling one must calculate what it can afford to lose. This imbalance matters because large corporations are not passive victims of weak systems. They can possess enormous power to influence regulation. A major bank, telco, or multinational can lobby policymakers, hire influential advisers, and gain access to decision-makers in ways that an ordinary citizen cannot. “If they want a regulation or a policy to be changed, they can lobby, they can push for it,” I said. “But they choose not to because they also benefit from that flawed system. And who loses in all this? The ordinary person.” Without independent reporting, the public sees only part of that relationship. Companies speak enthusiastically about innovation, inclusion, and the jobs they create. Far less is said about market dominance, labour practices, political connections, or the regulations they helped shape. Press releases become the story The effects are especially visible in Africa’s tech ecosystem. Startup coverage is heavily influenced by fundraising announcements, founder profiles, and carefully constructed claims about impact. The companies receiving the most attention are often those with the strongest communications machinery, not necessarily the strongest businesses. “Capital follows narrative,” I told Heijnen. Before capital becomes rational, it can follow emotion and attention. A compelling founder story attracts coverage. Coverage creates visibility. Visibility suggests momentum. That momentum attracts investors, partnerships, and still more coverage. Many highly funded startups understand this loop. They retain effective PR firms and build relationships with journalists and editors across the continent. They appear repeatedly in the media, becoming familiar to investors and policymakers. “Whether their business models are good, or they are solving a problem that is there, is neither here nor there,” I said. “They’ve mastered what can capture attention.” Journalists are meant to interrupt that loop with difficult questions. How many jobs did the company create? How much revenue does it generate? Are its customers better off? Did the product lower costs? What happened to the millions it raised three years ago? Are its claims independently verifiable? Yet these questions require time and expertise. It is much easier to rewrite an announcement saying that a startup has raised $5 million than to spend months investigating what happened after its previous round. “Fundraising should no longer be news,” I said. “A good idea should attract investment. The story should be the impact.” The amount raised is not meaningless. Funding can reveal where investors see opportunity and which sectors are attracting capital. But money entering a company should mark the beginning of the scrutiny, not the successful conclusion of its story. If journalism stops at the announcement, the media becomes part of the startup’s fundraising infrastructure. Funding accountability The answer is not to pretend journalism can exist
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