Happy pre-TGIF.

This week, Substack made an interesting move. The newsletter platform partnered with Pangram, an AI-writing detection software, to enable users to scan articles and comments to see how much estimated content was written by AI. I still don’t know how I feel about it. It’s borderline AI-shaming. The same tools that the tech bros of the world—running on high caffeine—built to increase productivity are now being treated like contraband. And I’m actually curious to see what use this serves. 

If this is about research on AI dependence, I think there’s an obvious endline, and we’ll discover that a lot of Substack authors use AI for framing and getting brilliant arguments across. No harm in that. But tell me, are you excited at the prospect of counting Substack posts that use AI?

Full disclosure: at least this opening lede is 100% human-written. Even Pangram says so.

—Emmanuel

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Walk into a spaza shop almost anywhere in South Africa and chances are you’ll find a Flash terminal selling airtime, electricity tokens, or betting vouchers. If the stars align, you could also find a Shop2Shop device helping the same merchant accept card payments, deposit cash, or manage stock. Pepkor, the South African retailer behind brands such as PEP and Ackermans, wants those two businesses to become one.

On Wednesday, Pepkor announced it will merge its fintech subsidiary, Flash, with merchant platform Shop2Shop in a deal that values the combined business at R21.3 billion ($1.3 billion). Pepkor will inject R1.57 billion ($95 million) in cash and fold Flash, valued at R10.6 billion ($640 million), into the combined business, giving it a 57.1% controlling stake in the new company. The retailer said the merged entity will be called “FintechCo.”

What’s changing? Flash built one of South Africa’s largest value-added services (VAS) networks, allowing merchants to sell products like airtime, data bundles, prepaid electricity, gaming vouchers, and bill payments. Shop2Shop tackles a different problem: helping the same merchants accept digital payments, manage cash, order inventory, and access other business services. Both businesses process more than R200 billion ($12 billion) in annual transaction value across the formal and informal economy.

State of play: The deal is another step in Pepkor’s plan to become more than a discount retailer. While clothing and household goods remain its biggest business, financial services have become an important growth engine for the South African retailer. 

In the first half of its 2026 financial year, Pepkor’s “Financial Services” business generated R3.0 billion ($182 million) in revenue, up 41.6% year-on-year. Flash now sits under Pepkor’s Informal Market Platform, where transaction volumes grew 20.3% to R34.7 billion ($2.1 billion). Connectivity is another pillar of Pepkor’s ecosystem strategy. By September 2024, the retailer had sold 11.5 million handsets, creating more opportunities to cross-sell lending, insurance, airtime, and other financial services to customers already in its network. 

Between the lines: This is ultimately a merchant acquisition play. South Africa’s informal retail economy, made up of hundreds of thousands of spaza shops and independent traders, still handles large volumes of cash despite steady growth in digital payments. Flash already reaches many of those merchants through prepaid products, while Shop2Shop helps them digitise everyday operations. Combining both gives Pepkor a stronger foothold in the businesses that millions of South Africans rely on daily.

Zoom out: Pepkor isn’t hiding the endgame. The retailer says it plans to separately list FintechCo, the combined fintech business, in the medium term—likely on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE)—which will create a standalone payments company while keeping control through its majority stake. If that happens, South Africa could soon have another publicly listed fintech, built not around affluent bank customers, but around the small merchants who power the country’s informal economy.

Bought a phone in January. It stopped charging in March. You walked back into the shop, receipt in hand, only to hear the dreaded words: “Warranty imeisha.” That conversation is about to get much shorter in Kenya.

What happened? From now on, every mobile phone, laptop, tablet, and several other communications devices sold in Kenya must come with at least a one-year warranty and a return policy. The new rules from the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA), the country’s telecom regulator, also require sellers to repair faulty devices during that period or risk penalties starting at KES 500,000 ($3,900) or 0.2% of annual turnover, whichever is higher.

Explain like I’m new here: Until now, your warranty often depended on where you bought the phone. Walk into an official Samsung or Apple store, and you’d likely get a manufacturer’s warranty. Buy the same phone from a smaller electronics shop or an online seller, and you might only get a 30- or 90-day shop warranty, especially if it was imported through unofficial channels or refurbished.

The new rules level that playing field. Whether the phone is brand new or refurbished, sellers are now responsible for standing behind what they sell for at least 12 months. Refurbished devices must also be clearly labelled as refurbished, online sellers must provide a physical address customers can visit, and every receipt must include the device’s serial number and warranty details.

But here’s the interesting part: Beyond providing warranties, Kenya is tightening control over its electronics market. On Tuesday, the regulator introduced a new telecom equipment licence for companies importing and distributing communications equipment. Now it’s turning its attention to the retailers who eventually sell those devices to consumers. From the moment a phone enters the country to the moment it lands in your pocket, regulators want every step documented.

Zoom out: Smartphone adoption in Kenya has exploded. The country now has 50.2 million smartphone connections as of March 2026, up from 29.5 million in 2023. As smartphones become people’s banks, offices, classrooms, and entertainment centres, buying one is now closely tied to their livelihoods. Kenya’s telecom regulator seems to agree.

M-KOPA, a fintech that provides smartphone financing and digital services, just crossed 10 million customers across five African markets—which sounds like a nice round number until you realise it took the company eight years of operations to reach its first million, and just six years to add the next nine. 

The Kenyan-born fintech, which started out selling solar home systems to off-grid households in 2011, said it has reached 10 million customers across Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa, and has sold 10 million smartphones. For its next act, M-KOPA is now onboarding over 10,000 new customers daily, deploying over $2.5 billion in credit since it was founded.

Explain like I’m new here: M-KOPA has long operated with the philosophy that Africa is a greenfield market. Most people in the informal sector earn daily, but banks don’t lend to people without payslips or collateral. The company flips the model: it sells you a smartphone on a daily repayment plan, locks the device if you miss payments (no debt accumulation, no threats), and uses your repayment behaviour to build a credit profile. Once you’ve proven you can pay, you unlock loans, insurance, and other financial services. The phone is the Trojan horse—no, not that Trojan horse everyone’s talking about. The financial relationship is the real product. 

The bigger picture. M-KOPA turned its first-ever profit in 2024, with revenue surging 66% to $416 million. In January 2023, it built a smartphone assembly facility in Nairobi that now produces over 2 million devices annually, cutting costs. The model that started with solar panels in Kenyan villages has now been stress-tested across five countries with wildly different economies—and it’s working.

Zoom out: M-KOPA’s 10 million customers represent something larger than a fintech milestone. The proof is in the pudding: it is Africa’s informal economy—or its “actual” economy if you’re bullish on the sector—banked by one of the consequential fintechs on the continent right now.

Dolphin Telecoms wants to make it easier for Africans living abroad to buy airtime for family back home. The Zimbabwe-based company is launching in South Africa on August 5 as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), a mobile operator that rents network space from existing carriers instead of building its own towers. It will run on Cell C, South Africa’s third-largest mobile network.

Dolphin already operates in Zimbabwe, where it became the first licenced MVNO in 2022 after investing $15 million. Now it’s betting that cross-border airtime gifting, sending phone credit to relatives in another country, is a problem worth solving at scale. 

What happened? Dolphin Telecoms South Africa has completed a soft launch and will go live in August as an MVNO targeting cross-border communities. The core pitch is cross-border airtime gifting: a South African-based Zimbabwean, for instance, can send airtime to a relative in Harare without wrestling with money transfer apps, bank queues, or the vague guilt of “I’ll send something next week.”

Explain like I’m new here: An MVNO is a mobile operator without the towers. Think of it as renting someone else’s highway but driving your own buses with your own rules. Dolphin rents space on Cell C’s network, then packages it for a specific crowd—in this case, diasporan Africans who need their phones to work across two countries, not just one.

Why now? South Africa’s MVNO market is having a moment. Cell C has over 5.1 million MVNO subscribers and has built an entire wholesale business around it. The market is projected to reach 14.4 million SIMs by 2030. The infrastructure is already there; what’s missing is a product built specifically for the Africans who live and work across borders; sending money from South Africa to Zimbabwe can cost as much as 12.7% in fees. Dolphin bets that if you design for border-crossers first, rather than tacking on a remittance feature later, you’re building a different kind of loyalty. 

Zoom out: The most interesting MVNOs don’t win by being cheaper; they win by knowing who their customer is. Capitec Bank’s MVNO, Capitec Connect, one of South Africa’s fastest-growing MVNOs, bundles banking and mobile for people the traditional banks ignore. Dolphin’s play is narrower but sharper; it’s building a product for a specific pain point. If it works, the model could spread to other corridors: Ghana-Nigeria, Kenya-Uganda, South Africa-Mozambique. The continent is filled with migrants, and most of them send something home. Dolphin wants to make airtime the easiest thing to send.