Happy pre-TGIF.

If someone told you in 2024 that South Africans would soon be paying for coffee with a ring that never needs charging, you would probably have assumed they had spent too much time watching fantasy fiction. Two years later, South Africans might start to do exactly that. 

VezoPay, the wearable payments startup behind the battery-free tap-to-pay ring, has gone live with Investec and Absa, taking its banking partnerships to four and putting it on track to add a fifth major retail bank before the end of 2026, as it tries to build network effects. Interesting times ahead for contactless payments in South Africa.

Let’s dive in.

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Nigeria has decided to bring virtual asset companies into the group chat. If the intention to regulate virtual assets was ever in doubt, the central bank’s decision to expand its regulatory sandbox to operators in the sector has now put any confusion to bed.

What happened? The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has opened a dedicated Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) track inside its regulatory sandbox for companies building stablecoins, wallets, custody platforms, payment processors, and settlement infrastructure. Applications are open from August 12 to August 31, and the programme now sits alongside the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) own digital asset incubation framework.

Explain like I’m new here: A regulatory sandbox is a supervised test environment where startups can try new financial products with real users under close regulatory oversight before receiving a full licence. It is a controlled proving ground for financial innovation.

Between the lines: Nigeria launched a fintech sandbox in 2022, but the first cohort disappeared into a fog of silence with very little public information about admissions, testing results, or outcomes. However, the new version is launching with a broader institutional reset. President Bola Tinubu’s Virtual Asset Council now brings together the CBN, the SEC, the country’s tax authority, intelligence, and national security agencies, suggesting that coordination is replacing the old agency-by-agency approach.

Stablecoins are the real signal here. Nigeria is no longer focusing only on crypto exchanges; it is preparing to supervise the infrastructure that moves digital currencies, settles cross-border payments, and could eventually compete with traditional banking rails.

Zoom out: If this sandbox produces clear rules and predictable supervision, Nigeria could become one of Africa’s most important testing grounds for regulated stablecoin payments. The bigger question is whether the CBN can do what many regulators struggle to do: move from publishing frameworks to publishing results.

In Q2 2026, Jumia, the e-commerce company, narrowed its quarterly loss from $16.6 million to $11.7 million year-on-year. 

After years of bleeding cash, its profitability push is beginning to look more convincing. Chief executive officer Francis Dufay has suggested it could come sooner than many expected. 

What happened? Jumia, the New York-listed African e-commerce company operating in Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and other markets, has secured $50 million in fresh equity funding. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private-sector investment arm, led the round with participation from Axian Telecom, one of Jumia’s largest shareholders—which acquired an 8% stake in the e-commerce company in May 2025—and other investors. 

Dufay told Bloomberg that the company received more investor interest than it anticipated. Raising $50 million from one of its largest shareholders is a vote of confidence that the company may finally be on the right track after years of losses and leadership shake-ups..

Explain like I’m new here: Jumia spent years trying to grow as fast as possible across the continent. The new strategy is almost the opposite: fewer distractions, tighter spending, and a much stronger focus on markets that can actually make money, especially Nigeria.

Between the lines: The numbers in Jumia’s Q2 2026 report tell a more important story than the fundraising headline. The company’s orders rose 28% year-on-year, active customers increased 24%, and gross profit jumped 28%, while the adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) loss narrowed by 36% to $8.7 million. 

Nigeria was Jumia’s standout market, with gross merchandise value (GMV) up 36% and orders up 34%. One fascinating detail: sales from Chinese and Turkish international sellers grew 96%, suggesting Jumia has fully embraced its identity as a marketplace for affordable imported goods rather than a traditional online retailer with large inventory.

Zoom out: The IFC’s involvement matters because development finance institutions rarely write equity cheques into businesses they think are spiralling toward irrelevance. Jumia’s cash position was only $48.3 million at the end of June, so this raise buys time. More importantly, it buys credibility for a company now claiming it can reach breakeven in Q4 2026 and profitability in 2027—or even profitability by Q4 2026, as Dufay told Bloomberg. If Jumia pulls that off, it would mark one of the most significant turnaround stories in African tech in years.

While many traditional retailers struggle to make online delivery profitable, Shoprite, the South African retail giant, has turned its grocery app into a heavyweight contender. For the year ended June 2026, the retailer’s online delivery platform, Sixty60, generated a staggering R25.5 billion ($1.6 billion) in sales.

What happened? Shoprite reported that Sixty60 grew by 34.5% over the past year, expanding nearly five times faster than the company’s core South African supermarket operations, which grew a modest 7.1%. The digital platform now accounts for about 9.4% of the group’s total reported sales. The digital surge is happening alongside an aggressive physical expansion: the group opened 262 more physical stores across South Africa during the year, taking its total corporate-owned store base in the country to 2,839. It reflects Shoprite’s increasingly home-first strategy, after it exited Ghana and Malawi in 2025.

Explain like I’m new here: Sixty60 doesn’t operate in a vacuum; it rides on the back of Shoprite’s massive physical footprint. Instead of building expensive standalone warehouses, Shoprite uses its existing supermarkets—from Checkers to Usave—as fulfillment hubs. By connecting its stores directly to digital demand, the retailer has turned its physical real estate into an instant delivery network. It’s the retail equivalent of putting an engine inside a tank.

The maths of the momentum: Shoprite’s Sixty60 now processes R25.5 billion ($1.6 billion) in order transactions; the app generates about R69.8 million ($4.3 million) every single day in on-demand grocery orders. Meanwhile, Shoprite kept internal food inflation to just 0.8%, way below the national average of 3.9%. This suggests that Shoprite is using its massive bargaining power with suppliers to keep prices low for customers, a strategy that is driving higher sales volumes and fattening headline earnings by up to 14.7%.

Zoom out: Shoprite’s success with Sixty60 dismantles the old myth that online grocery delivery is a margin-destroying trap. By fusing physical store expansion with digital convenience, the retailer has built a hybrid model that few competitors on the continent can touch. In the battle for African retail dominance, Shoprite has proven that physical stores and digital apps aren’t rivals—they’re the ultimate tag team.

Vodacom, the South African telecom giant, has appointed Segun Ogunsanya, the former Group chief executive officer (CEO) of Airtel Africa, as an independent non-executive director, effective October 9, 2026.

Who is Segun Ogunsanya? With over 35 years of leadership experience, Ogunsanya is one of the most respected operators in African corporate history. Before stepping down from Airtel Africa in July 2024, he spent more than a decade steering the London-listed multinational through a period of massive expansion across 14 African countries. Before his telecom run, Ogunsanya managed bottling and distribution networks as a senior leader at Coca-Cola operations across Africa and focused on regional strategy at Ecobank.

Why now? Vodacom is in the middle of a massive identity shift. Under its Vision 2030 strategy, the telecom company is aggressively expanding beyond traditional voice and data into financial services, digital platforms, and enterprise tech. Bringing in a battle-tested veteran who successfully grew Airtel’s mobile money and data arms across 14 markets gives Vodacom an invaluable strategic depth as it prepares for the next phase of its evolution.

Zoom out: Ogunsanya’s arrival coincides with a broader leadership transition at Vodacom, including the planned retirement of long-serving chairman Saki Macozoma in July 2027. By welcoming a former chief of a rival onto its board, Vodacom is signalling that its ambitions go far beyond South Africa’s borders. In the race to become Africa’s premier digital technology company, experience across West, East, and Central Africa is the ultimate competitive edge.