What to expect at Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote on Monday
Table of contents When and how to watch the Apple WWDC 2026 What to expect at the Apple WWDC 2026 When will you actually get these features? One more thing: Tim Cook’s farewell Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote will be held on Monday, June 8, at 10 a.m. PT (6:00 p.m. WAT). If you have ever skipped an Apple software event because it felt like a routine update show, this is the year to pay attention. Two things make this year’s Apple WWDC different from any keynote in the past decade. One, it is Tim Cook’s last keynote as Apple CEO. He announced in April that he would step down on September 1, with John Ternus taking the top job. Second, Apple has a lot to prove in AI. The company promised a smarter, more personal Siri back in 2024, advertised it heavily alongside the iPhone 16, and then repeatedly delayed it, resulting in a $250 million settlement. WWDC 2026 is where Apple has to show the rebuild is done. Here is everything you can expect to see. When and how to watch the Apple WWDC 2026 The keynote starts Monday, June 8, at 10 a.m. PT (6:00 p.m. WAT). Here is what that looks like in your time zone: 1 pm ET (US East Coast) 6 pm BST (UK) 6 pm WAT (Nigeria and West Africa) 7 pm CEST (Central Europe) You can watch it live on Apple.com, the Apple TV app, or Apple’s YouTube channel. Apple pre-records its WWDC keynotes, so there is no live Q&A. The Platforms State of the Union, which is more developer-focused, follows at 1 p.m. PT on the same day. WWDC runs from June 8 through June 12. What to expect at the Apple WWDC 2026 1. The new Siri: This is the centrepiece of the whole event. Apple is overhauling Siri from the ground up, and for the first time, it will work like a proper AI chatbot. Powered by Google Gemini Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported in November 2025 that Apple licenced a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Gemini model from Google at roughly $1 billion per year. Apple and Google confirmed the partnership in a joint statement in January 2026. The deal means Apple’s new Siri runs on a model that is eight times larger than the one Apple built on its own. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian confirmed the arrangement publicly at Google Cloud Next in April 2026, saying the companies are building “the next generation of Apple Foundation Models based on Gemini technology.” The financial terms and model size figures come from Bloomberg reporting, not from either company officially. A dedicated Siri app Siri is getting its own standalone app across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It works like ChatGPT or Gemini: text and voice input, back-and-forth conversation, and saved chat history that syncs via iCloud. You can set history to expire after 30 days, a year, or never. The interface defaults to a dark theme and includes a button for uploading images and documents. The Dynamic Island glow When you activate Siri on your iPhone, the Dynamic Island will expand and glow. Swiping down from the top centre of the screen pulls up a “Search or Ask” bar that replaces Spotlight search. You can swipe down further to open a full conversation, which looks similar to an iMessage thread, with mini cards for weather, calendar entries, and notes appearing inline. Context awareness and app actions This is what Apple actually promised in 2024 and never shipped. The new Siri is expected to: Read what is on your screen and respond to it Access your emails, messages, calendar, contacts, and photos to give you personalised answers Take actions inside and across apps, such as booking a calendar event or sending a message, based on a single request Handle multi-step instructions in one sentence You choose your AI model A new Extensions system will let you pick which AI handles Apple Intelligence features. The options are ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude. Each can have its own voice, so you know which model answered. This ends OpenAI’s exclusivity on the iPhone. If you never change your settings, you will be routed to Gemini by default. Important: This is a preview, not a full launch Gurman has reported Apple is still labelling the new Siri a “beta” internally. Developer builds include a toggle to switch back to the old Siri. Apple may put some features behind a waitlist when iOS 27 ships in September. In February 2026, Apple engineers working on the iOS 26.5 test build reported that not all features were working reliably. Set your expectations accordingly. 2. iOS 27: Think of iOS 27 as a clean-up release. In the same way Apple released Mac OS X Snow Leopard in 2009, mostly to fix things rather than add features, iOS 27 is focused on making your iPhone faster and more reliable. iOS 26 shipped with complaints about overheating, battery drain, keyboard failures, UI glitches, and slow animations. iOS 27 is built to address that. Liquid Glass gets refined Apple is not removing its Liquid Glass design from iOS 27. The look introduced in iOS 26 remains, but Apple is adjusting the transparency and contrast to improve readability. There will reportedly be a system-wide slider you can use to dial back the effect. Tab bars in apps like Music, Podcasts, and Apple TV will also get updated. AI features are spreading across apps Apple Intelligence is expanding into more built-in apps: Camera: Visual Intelligence now appears in the Camera app as its own mode. You will be able to scan a nutrition label straight into the Health app or scan a phone number into Contacts. Photos: New generative editing tools called Extend, Enhance, and Reframe are coming, though Gurman says some may not make the final cut if testing stays inconsistent. Shortcuts: You will be able to create shortcuts by describing what you want in plain language. Safari: A new feature called Organise Tabs will
Read MoreEric Asuma on childhood, ambition, and refusing to sell Kenyan Wall Street
There is a type of entrepreneurs who start a company because they have seen a gap in the market. Then there is the kind who start one because they are trying to make sense of the world around them. When I met Eric Asuma, founder of The Kenyan Wall Street, he struck me as belonging to the second group. He grew up watching his parents run small businesses, where every shilling mattered, and every decision carried far-reaching consequences. Long before he became a founder, he had a front-row seat to the realities of building a company from scratch. He credits his parents with instilling the discipline and resilience that would later shape his own entrepreneurial journey. In 2014, while working at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE), he started The Kenyan Wall Street as a side project. At first, it was little more than a hobby—a platform to explain markets and provide investors with information that was often difficult to find or understand. More than a decade later, that hobby has evolved into Wall Street Africa, a financial intelligence business spanning media, data, and events, serving a growing community of investors across the continent. Over a video call, we talked about growing up around entrepreneurs, the early days of building a financial media company when few believed there was a market for it, the evolution from content to intelligence, and why he believes Africa’s investment ecosystem still suffers from an information problem. We also discussed legacy. Asuma says he wants to be remembered not simply as the founder of a company, but as someone who built critical infrastructure that helped investors better understand markets. The future, he says, looks promising. But like many founders, he seems less interested in the destination than in the work of building. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What experiences from your childhood shaped the way you think about money, opportunity, and economic mobility today? It mostly comes down to upbringing. I grew up in a household where entrepreneurship wasn’t an abstract idea; it was daily life. My parents ran small businesses, and I watched closely how those businesses were started, sustained, and sometimes rebuilt after setbacks. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was formative. That environment shapes your thinking. You learn early that resources are limited, but imagination is not. You also learn that effort compounds slowly, often invisibly, before it produces any meaningful outcome. My parents didn’t frame this as a philosophy; it was simply how they lived. You start something small, you keep going, you adjust, you try again. What stayed with me most was the discipline behind entrepreneurship. Nothing was wasted—not time, not opportunity, not effort. That mindset creates a respect for work itself, regardless of scale. We came from a very humble background, so economic mobility was never assumed. It was something you had to actively work toward. But my parents instilled a belief: if you put in the work and stay persistent, opportunities eventually show up. Not always in predictable ways, but they do arrive. That belief has influenced how I think about building businesses and approaching setbacks. Even today, I return to that early conditioning: start small, stay consistent, and trust that compounding will eventually do its work. Before the Kenyan Wall Street existed, what did you believe was missing from Africa’s financial and business information ecosystem? It was less a grand idea and more an observation that accumulated over time. I was working at the stock exchange, with a front-row seat to how information moved—or didn’t move—through the system. What struck me was how fragmented and manual it all was. Africa’s markets had returns, activity, and real economic significance, but the information infrastructure lagged far behind more developed markets. Data wasn’t always accessible in real time. Sometimes it wasn’t structured at all. Even basic market functions—bond pricing, yields, calculations—were often handled through separate spreadsheets maintained by different institutions. There was no unified system of truth. Yet fixed income dominates African capital markets, accounting for more than 70% of activity in some markets. While global attention often gravitates toward equities, the real engine of the system was happening in a relatively opaque corner of finance. Institutions were making multi-million-dollar decisions with limited automation and inconsistent data pipelines. It was not a lack of intelligence; it was a lack of infrastructure. This shaped the direction of what we eventually built at the intersection of capital markets intelligence, financial media, and institutional tools. The thinking evolved from a media-first approach into something broader: you cannot build effective markets without first building the information layer that supports them. What problem were you trying to solve when you launched The Kenyan Wall Street, and how has that vision evolved into Wall Street Africa? When I started what later became The Kenyan Wall Street around 2014, it wasn’t originally a business idea, more a side project. I was working at the stock exchange, and friends constantly asked how they could access market information. That question kept coming up, and it exposed a gap I had taken for granted while inside the system. Inside the exchange, I also noticed something unusual: information flow was not automated. In more developed markets, announcements move through tightly integrated systems; everyone receives them simultaneously. In our case, information could physically arrive at the exchange and sit at reception for hours or even days before reaching the broader market. That delay, in finance, is not just inefficient; it is material. I started casually sharing snippets of information online. At first, it was curiosity-driven. I didn’t think of it as a product. But something interesting happened: the audience expanded quickly. I began receiving messages from investors—some in Dubai, others in Europe—asking for deeper insights into specific companies. These were not casual readers; they were institutional actors making real allocation decisions. I resisted the idea that this could become a formal business. I wasn’t trained as an analyst. But demand kept growing, and the feedback became consistent: build a
Read MoreNigeria licenced 46 telecom challengers to rival MTN and Airtel. Few have taken off.
Every morning before Ewoma Okweni logs in to work from her apartment in Ajah, a suburban neighbourhood in Lagos, she calculates how much internet bandwidth the day will cost her. An audit officer at PwC Nigeria, Okweni spends between eight and ten hours online daily on days she works from home, moving between cloud-hosted spreadsheets, PowerPoint files, video meetings, and Chrome windows that multiply endlessly across her screen. Twenty gigabytes of data disappear in three or four days. She buys a weekly ₦5,000 ($3.65) bundle because, for her, the monthly plans no longer make economic sense for the kind of work she does. “I have like thirty tabs open on Chrome, multiple PowerPoint files open,” she told TechCabal in a telephone conversation. And I work on the cloud. Whatever you do has to be saved on the cloud.” On weekends, the data drain continues with Netflix, Instagram, and YouTube. Yet despite rising costs and persistent frustrations, Okweni has never seriously considered leaving MTN for one of Nigeria’s new Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs)–telecom providers that offer voice, data, and messaging services by leasing network capacity from established operators. The prospect feels like more hassle than it is worth: SIM registration, identity verification, and uncertainty over whether the service will be reliable enough to justify the switch. “I don’t think I really need another one,” she said. “And I’ll be concerned if they can maintain the service over time.” That quiet hesitation may explain one of the strangest stories unfolding inside Nigeria’s telecom sector. In October 2025, Vitel Wireless became the first MVNO to officially launch operations in Nigeria, entering the market with the promise of innovation, flexibility, and new competition in an industry long dominated by MTN, Airtel, Globacom, and 9mobile. Between November 2025, when the NCC began tracking the company’s active subscriber base, and March 2026, when the latest industry data was released, the company recorded no active subscribers. The only measurable growth the NCC has recorded has come through mobile number portability. The number of subscribers porting into Vitel’s network rose from five in November 2025 to 17 in March, suggesting a broader struggle to attract users at scale. However, Vitel Wireless disputes the picture painted by the NCC’s subscriber figures. “Vitel Wireless currently has the fifth-largest mobile subscriber base in Nigeria, although it remains well behind long-established operators such as MTN, Airtel, and Glo, which have operated in the market for more than three decades,” Chudi Nwabueze, the company’s chief operating officer, told TechCabal in an emailed response. For Vitel, the experience since launch has reinforced both the opportunity and difficulty of operating as an MVNO in Nigeria. “One of the biggest lessons for Vitel Wireless has been that Nigeria’s telecom market still presents enormous opportunities for customer-focused MVNOs despite being largely dominated by established MNOs,” Nwabueze added. “The market is highly competitive, but there is still significant room for operators that can innovate around affordability, service delivery, and market penetration.” The gap between Vitel’s claims and the NCC’s subscriber data highlights a broader challenge in Nigeria’s nascent MVNO market: accurately measuring commercial traction. While MVNOs acquire customers and scale operations in real time, the NCC relies on quarterly or biannual compliance reports submitted by operators, creating a reporting lag. As a result, subscriber gains from aggressive customer-acquisition campaigns may not appear in official industry statistics until months later, making it difficult to assess an operator’s true market position at any given time. The promise of a telecom revolution When the NCC licenced 25 MVNOs in June 2023, it envisioned a more competitive telecom market where smaller, agile operators could challenge the dominance of the big networks, expand connectivity in underserved areas, and build tailored services for niche customer segments. Interest in the model grew quickly, with the number of licenced MVNOs rising to 46 by January 2024. But before the sector had a chance to gain traction, the NCC hit the brakes. On May 17, 2024, the regulator placed a temporary freeze on new MVNO licences alongside Interconnect Exchange and VAS Aggregator licences to avoid overcrowding a market still in its infancy. The ambition was not without precedent. Nigeria’s MVNO framework drew inspiration from the United Kingdom, widely regarded as the birthplace of the modern MVNO industry. What began in 1999, when Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, launched Virgin Mobile on the One2One network, has since evolved into a mature market worth more than $5.23 billion, with over 110 MVNO brands competing across a wide range of customer segments. As of 2025, about 20.19 million UK subscribers use MVNOs such as giffgaff, Lyca Mobile, Tesco Mobile, Lebara, and VOXI—often without realising that these providers operate without owning telecom towers or spectrum licences. Instead, they buy wholesale network capacity from infrastructure owners such as EE, O2, and Vodafone, allowing them to focus on pricing, customer service, and niche market offerings. Tesco Mobile is considered the largest MVNO in the UK with over 5.5 million subscribers. South Africa is the undisputed heavyweight of Africa’s MVNO market. The sector is a thriving $543 million (R8.6 billion) industry with over 23 active virtual operators serving roughly 4.5 million subscribers. The appeal of the MVNO model lies in its lower barriers to entry. Without the enormous cost of building towers or acquiring spectrum licences, operators can focus on pricing, customer service, branding, or niche offerings tailored to specific user groups. On paper, Nigeria appeared ready for a similar transformation. The country has a young and increasingly digital population, rising smartphone penetration, growing data consumption, and an economy becoming more dependent on remote work, fintech, cloud services, and streaming platforms. Consumers are already frustrated by poor service quality and rising data costs, creating what looks like a strong appetite for alternatives. The NCC tried to kick-start the MVNO market in 2022 by introducing a licencing framework that outlined who could operate as an MVNO, the fees they would pay, and the rules they would follow. One key rule was that
Read MoreNigeria’s Daya taps Aptos to power Africa-Middle East stablecoin payments
Daya, a Nigerian B2B stablecoin payments startup, has partnered with Aptos Foundation and Dubai-based crypto exchange HashKey MENA to launch a pilot stablecoin settlement corridor connecting businesses in Africa and the Middle East. The partnership will allow businesses to convert local currencies into stablecoins, settle transactions on the Aptos blockchain, and receive funds in local currencies at the destination. The move marks Aptos’ latest effort to push into Africa. The Layer 1 blockchain, originally built in 2021 to power decentralised finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and gaming, is now increasingly positioning itself around cross-border payments infrastructure in emerging markets. Under the pilot, HashKey MENA will provide regulated fiat on- and off-ramps in the Middle East, while Daya will facilitate payment flows across African markets, including the Nigerian Naira and other local currencies. The corridor will also support bank transfers, virtual local-currency accounts, and payment application programming interfaces (APIs) that businesses and fintechs can integrate into their operations. The pilot is part of HashKey’s Asia Connect network, which links payment corridors across Hong Kong, the Philippines, Vietnam, the UAE, and now Africa. “Africa is already a front-runner in stablecoin adoption. What’s been missing is the regulated infrastructure and scalable liquidity to connect that demand to the rest of the world,” Paul Joe, co-founder of Daya, said. “By joining HashKey’s Asia Connect network as the African node, with settlement on Aptos, we’re plugging into a network that already runs from Hong Kong to the Philippines to Vietnam to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).” In July 2025, Aptos partnered with pan-African stablecoin payments startup Yellow Card to power cross-border transactions in 20 African countries. For blockchain firms, these partnerships are distribution strategies. In October 2025, Flutterwave, Africa’s largest payments startup, partnered with Polygon; eight months later, it expanded its blockchain settlement strategy with Tempo. Separately, Nigerian fintech Paga partnered with Sui in May 2026 to build stablecoin infrastructure. By integrating with fintechs and payment providers that already serve businesses and consumers, networks such as Aptos gain access to real-world payment flows that can drive transaction volume, deepen liquidity, and strengthen network adoption. The Aptos payment push with Daya and Hashkey MENA targets a longstanding challenge in emerging markets, where cross-border payments often move through correspondent banking networks and foreign currencies before reaching their final destination, increasing costs and settlement times for businesses. Founded in October 2025 by Tomiwa “Aleph” Lasebikan, a former co-founder of Y Combinator-backed crypto startup Helicarrier, and Joe, Daya provides stablecoin-enabled cross-border payment infrastructure for African businesses. The company is backed by New York-based crypto accelerator Alliance DAO. The Aptos blockchain will serve as the settlement layer for the corridor, while Daya and HashKey MENA handle fiat connectivity and local payment distribution. Aptos has a market capitalisation of $568.7 million and has processed about 7.9 million stablecoin transactions in the last 30 days, according to US-based stablecoin analytics platform Artemis, far fewer than other native blockchains like Base, Binance Smart Chain (BNB), and Solana that have recorded over 100 million transactions in the same period.
Read MoreQuick Fire 🔥 with Somtochi Onyekwere
Somtochi Onyekwere is an open-source maintainer and a Senior Software Engineer with over five years of experience building reliable, scalable systems that help developers deploy applications at global technology companies. At Fly.io, she works on Corrosion, the open-source distributed system behind the networking layer. Before Fly, she was a Developer Experience Engineer and maintainer of FluxCD, an open-source project for GitOps on Kubernetes that powers enterprise developer platforms at companies like Microsoft and ControlPlane. Alongside her engineering work, Somtochi is passionate about building community, a thread that runs back to her time at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, as a GitHub Campus Expert and Ingressive Campus Ambassador. Today, she co-organises Kubernetes Community Days Nigeria, whose third edition last year drew over 500 attendees from across Africa. Explain your job to a five-year-old. I work on the tools that let other people run their websites and apps, the ones you use on your phone every day. It’s a bit like building houses for people. Normally, if you wanted a house, you’d have to buy the land, gather the materials, and put it all together yourself. The companies I work with handle all of that for you. You just show up with your stuff and move in. What do you love about your job, and what frustrates you? What I love about my job is the kind of problems I get to solve and the people I get to solve them with. Fly.io has some of the most outstanding engineers I’ve had the opportunity to work with. On the problem side, I enjoy working on distributed systems and figuring out how to scale them while keeping them reliable. You start to encounter interesting problems when you take a programme from running on a single computer to running across multiple computers. It breaks many of the assumptions programmers are used to working with. I also like that we care about developer experience and make it easy for users to deploy and scale their applications. What both frustrates and excites me is Murphy’s Law: anything that can break will break. We work on systems that can fail but still need to be reliable enough to meet user needs. I remember sitting through my first incident and watching everyone move with urgency, fixing what was broken, and making sure things returned to normal. Now that I’ve had my own share of incidents, I’ve become better at debugging under pressure and learned to think about different failure modes from the start. What’s a ‘GOAT moment’ in your tech career so far? Tell us in a short story. When my previous company, Weaveworks, shut down, I decided to be intentional about the type of company I joined next. I made a list of companies doing interesting things in the infrastructure space—companies whose engineering blogs I’d been reading for fun—and started applying. Fly.io was at the top of that list, and the interview process was tough. But making it through wasn’t the end of the challenge. I wanted to bring that same intentionality to the work I did at Fly.io. I worked on two other projects before landing on Corrosion, but it was by far the toughest. To make things harder, it was written in a language I didn’t know. So I learned it quickly, and within a few months I was contributing meaningfully to the codebase. Eventually, I became the primary developer on it. Going from “I’ve never written this language” to “I own this system” in that span is something I’m quietly proud of, partly because of the technical leap, but also because it reminded me that being a great engineer means taking unknown or unclear problems, breaking them down, and finding solutions. You’ve spent years building community from student meetups during university days to co-organising Kubernetes Community Days Nigeria. Why does community work matter to you alongside engineering? Community and engineering have never been separate for me. They’ve always gone hand in hand. Open-source is where I honed my craft when I was starting out and learned how engineering works in the real world: people sharing what they know, working through ideas in public, and taking part in the conversations that shape what a project becomes. That belief has shaped how I show up. As a student, I organised tech meetups as a GitHub Campus Expert and Ingressive Campus Ambassador, helping about fifty students build the skills needed to get started in the industry. Later, I advocated for a dedicated space for Africans in the Kubernetes Slack community, a group that has grown to more than 450 members. Today, I co-organise Kubernetes Community Days Nigeria, whose most recent edition brought together over 500 attendees and speakers from across Africa to learn, share, and build together. I’ve gained a lot from the community: mentors, collaborators, friends, and opportunities. That’s exactly why I keep investing in the next generation of engineers. Whether it’s mentoring a student through their first pull request (PR) or helping someone prepare for their first conference talk, the goal is the same: leave the community stronger than I found it. Did your 16-year-old self ever imagine she’d end up in software engineering? Sixteen-year-old me had a lot of interests: maths, physics, engineering, writing, and teaching. A lot of paths seemed exciting and viable back then. I’d just finished secondary school and was watching movies to pass the time. I always found myself drawn to the ones with a hacker at a computer, typing furiously, solving impossible problems, and helping the rest of the crew pull off the mission. So the seeds were already there. I figured I’d at least give it a try. But sixteen-year-old me had no idea how far it could go, and I think she’d be pretty excited to see what I’m doing now. What else would you be doing if not software engineering? I’ll probably explore being a fiction writer. I don’t write as much these days, but I still love good storytelling and using words as
Read MoreSafaricom’s $6 fibre plan targets market dominated by estate internet providers
Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telecoms operator, is pushing deeper into the low-cost broadband market with internet plans starting at KES 800 ($6) a month, competing with smaller internet providers and estate Wi-Fi operators that have long served price-sensitive customers. The company is also testing a pay-as-you-go internet service called Wi-Fi Bamba in low income areass, including Kawangware, Kangemi and Kiambu Bus Park. The pilot has more than 800 active users, targeting budget-conscious customers and people in high-footfall areas such as markets and bus parks, Safaricom told TechCabal on Friday. The move pits Safaricom against operators like Vilcom, Ahadi Wireless and Poa! Internet that have built businesses serving price-sensitive households, one of the few parts of Kenya’s internet market where the telecom giant has not enjoyed the same dominance it holds in mobile services. “Wi-Fi Bamba is currently in the pilot phase within densely populated areas of Nairobi and Kiambu, specifically Kawangware, Kangemi, and Kiambu Bus Park,” Safaricom told TechCabal in a statement. “Subject to a successful and commercially viable pilot, we plan to scale the product to similar neighbourhoods across Kenya.” Safaricom said its entry-level products include Wi-Fi Bamba and Fibre Lite, offering speeds of between 10 megabits per second (Mbps) and 20 Mbps for KES 800 ($6) to KES 2,000 ($15) a month. The company doubled speeds across the packages in May without adjusting monthly prices. While Fibre Lite is available in selected affordable housing developments and lower-income estates, Wi-Fi Bamba remains limited to pilot zones in Nairobi and Kiambu. Safaricom said it plans to expand the service to similar neighbourhoods across the country if the pilot proves commercially viable. Unlike traditional home fibre products, Wi-Fi Bamba does not require installation, a router or a subscription. Customers within coverage areas can connect directly from their devices, select a browsing package, pay through M-PESA and begin using the service immediately. The service is delivered through wireless access points fed by fibre connections running through Safaricom’s base station network, according to the company. “Wi-Fi Bamba is delivered via radio technology, backhauled through fibre connectivity at Safaricom base stations and distributed through a network of access points,” the telco said. Unlike mobile services, where Safaricom controls 66.8% of mobile subscriptions, fixed broadband remains fragmented. According to data by the Communications Authority, the company held a 34.9% share of fixed internet subscriptions at the end of 2025, ahead of JTL’s 20.1%, Wananchi Group’s 11.1% and Poa! Internet’s 10.7%. In fixed broadband, smaller operators have carved out positions by focusing on specific neighbourhoods, customer segments and pricing tiers. The target market for Safaricom’s new products overlaps with the customer base served by Poa! Internet and tens of estate-based internet providers, many of which compete on affordability, flexible payments and localised service. Lower-income neighbourhoods have already produced sizeable broadband businesses. Poa! Internet had 263,305 subscribers at the end of 2025, while Ahadi Wireless and Vilcom served 222,060 and 133,316 customers respectively, according to Communications Authority data. Their growth has helped attract larger operators such as Safaricom to the segment. The low-cost plans also offer Safaricom a way to attract households that may still rely primarily on mobile data or informal neighbourhood internet networks. If the pilot expands beyond its current locations, Safaricom will be entering a market segment that smaller internet providers have spent years building, setting up a new contest for customers at the lower end of Kenya’s broadband market as demand for home internet continues to grow.
Read MoreInterswitch joins race for Africa’s banking technology market with Temenos deal
Interswitch, one of Africa’s leading integrated payments companies, has partnered with Geneva-headquartered banking software provider Temenos to offer managed banking services to financial institutions across the continent, deepening its push into banking technology. The partnership will see Interswitch adopt Temenos’ banking technology across core banking, digital banking, payments, wealth management, and financial crime management, enabling it to provide cloud-hosted and on-premises managed services to lenders on the continent. The deal signals Interswitch’s ambitions to become a broader banking technology provider and capture a larger share of banks’ technology spend at a time when lenders on the continent are modernising ageing technology systems. Six Nigerian banks spent ₦268.7 billion ($171.5 million) on IT infrastructure, including core banking system upgrades, in 2024. “This is a pivotal moment for Interswitch as we accelerate our expansion beyond payments and reimagine digital banking for Africa,” Jonah Adams, managing director for Digital Infrastructure and Managed Services at Interswitch, said in a statement on Thursday. The service will initially target Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and other African markets. By combining Temenos’ software with its existing footprint across the continent, Interswitch is positioning itself as a technology partner that can help banks upgrade critical systems without having to manage the complexity of large-scale technology deployments. The banking-as-a-service market in the Middle East and Africa is projected to reach $27.10 billion in 2026, according to global market research firm Mordor Intelligence. “By adopting Temenos’ cloud-native, composable platform, Interswitch gains the flexibility and scalability to accelerate its next phase of growth and deliver banking services that meet the needs of African markets,” Adams said. Founded in 2002, Interswitch built its reputation as one of Africa’s largest payments companies through products such as Quickteller and Verve, its domestic card scheme that crossed 100 million payment cards issued in December 2025. The move to offer managed banking services pitches it against companies like CWG Plc, which has a partnership with Indian multinational financial company Infosys, to distribute the Finacle core banking application to top Nigerian banks, including First Bank and GTBank. For Temenos, the deal strengthens its presence in Africa through a partner with deep relationships across the banking sector. It lost one of its banking customers, Sterling Bank, in 2024 after the tier-2 Nigerian bank switched to SEABaaS, a new custom-built core banking application. “Interswitch is an important new customer and partner for Temenos in Africa,” said William Moroney, Chief Revenue Officer at Temenos. “Interswitch’s strong presence across the continent also extends our reach and further strengthens our ecosystem and partner network.”
Read MoreNedbank taps AI-powered lending to reach underserved South Africans
Nedbank, one of South Africa’s largest banks, is turning to artificial intelligence to expand lending to millions of customers who have traditionally fallen outside the reach of formal credit. The Johannesburg-based lender has partnered with JUMO, a fintech infrastructure company, to launch Nedbank Quick Loans, an AI-powered lending product embedded within the Nedbank Money App. Customers can apply for loans from as little as R500 ($27) and receive credit decisions within minutes, with repayment terms ranging from one to 12 months. The partnership indicates a broader shift in African banking, with lenders increasingly turning to fintechs and AI to reach customers that conventional credit models have struggled to serve. The real test will not be how much money the partnership lends, but whether it can profitably offer fair, transparent credit to millions of low-income and thin-file borrowers who have historically relied on loan sharks, payday lenders and other informal lenders. “By embedding JUMO’s AI-led proprietary models and processes into Nedbank’s Money App, we are enabling a quick and easy client experience,” said Mutsa Chironga, Managing Executive for Personal Banking at Nedbank. “It is a great solution for smaller and short-term borrowing needs clients have.” Nedbank, which has a market capitalisation of R127 billion ($6.9 billion), is providing the balance sheet and banking infrastructure. JUMO, which operates in eight African markets and has facilitated more than $10 billion in loans across the continent, supplies the AI-powered lending engine that evaluates borrowers in real time. “We’ve spent the last 11 years building banking infrastructure and earning the trust of banks,” JUMO CEO Paul Whelpton told TechCabal on Thursday. “What we’re now seeing is JUMO becoming the intelligence layer of African financial services.” Historically, small-ticket lending has been difficult for banks. Customer onboarding costs were high, risk assessment was expensive, and predicting defaults among borrowers with limited credit histories was challenging. As a result, 37% of consumers who turned to the short-term informal credit market, dominated by more than 40,000 loan sharks, eventually required debt counselling. JUMO believes AI can change that equation. According to Whelpton, the platform analyses transactional, behavioural and repayment signals to assess both a customer’s ability and willingness to repay a loan. “We use behavioural and transactional information, as well as signals we have learned over the last decade about how customers behave outside the traditional banking and credit world,” he said. Whelpton noted that JUMO’s technology can help lenders serve customers who lack formal payslips, audited financial statements or extensive credit bureau histories. “I think the average man on the street, or the grandmother in the township, will now get access to formal credit in the right way,” he said. “It’s fully transparent, with no hidden fees and nothing that could hurt them or get them into a debt trap.” Questions remain about whether easier access to digital credit could create new forms of over-indebtedness. Whelpton said JUMO and Nedbank have implemented strict affordability measures and lend below regulatory maximum thresholds to avoid pushing customers to their limits. The economics appear promising. JUMO says it has disbursed more than $10 billion across Africa and processes about $240 million in loans each month. Despite focusing on unsecured lending and customers with limited traditional credit histories, its banking partnerships are recording default rates of about 3.3%. The partnership offers a glimpse into South Africa’s banking future, where banks provide the capital and trust, while fintechs deliver the intelligence that determines who gains access to credit.
Read MoreHow AI is breaking banking’s old employment model
Banking jobs in Kenya and, by extension, most African markets have carried a certain social prestige thanks to stable salaries, pension plans, and confidence in a sector that seems too important to shrink. But the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) is threatening to rewrite this promise. Looking at a bank like Standard Chartered Kenya (StanChart), the numbers tell a big story before its executives do. In 2013, StaChart had over 2,200 employees. At the time, the bank operated a large branch network, sizable operational teams, several middle-management roles, and thousands of employees handling most processes manually—from onboarding customers and processing paperwork to compliance reviews and reconciliations. By the end of 2025, its workforce fell below 1,000 employees for the first time in history. These shifts at Stanchart signal re-pricing of labour inside Africa’s banking sector. The work that used to justify thousands of entry- and mid-level roles is now being done by systems that are cheaper and involve far fewer people. In May, the lender’s parent company signalled that the decade-long cuts are not temporary, but part of its new strategic focus. During an investor event in Hong Kong on May 19, the British bank said it plans to cut more than 15% of its support-function staff by 2030. These are the people working in areas like human resources, compliance, procurement, operations, and administration. The bank openly said AI will help replace many of those tasks as its acceleration will “deliver faster execution and clear financial outcomes.” It is moving toward what it calls a “simple, connected and fast” operating model, in which every task is assigned to automation, AI-assisted workflows, or humans. By 2027, it expects 90% of key technology controls to be continuously monitored by AI, while 80% of controls will be fully codified into executable rules. Operational processes are also being automated, with AI document processing targeted at 95% accuracy (up from 85%) and virtual assistants expected to resolve up to 60% of internal queries without human intervention. The bank has deployed more than 300 AI use cases, including 43 high-impact generative AI applications, and trained about 85,000 staff on Microsoft Copilot. It is reporting early efficiency gains, including a 40% reduction in false positives in digital asset surveillance, an 88% cut in monitoring manpower through centralised systems (saving roughly $10 million annually), and a 30% reduction in manual effort tied to regulatory change implementation. AI is coming for the people The first wave of digital banking killed some branches, but AI is now coming for the few ones that are remaining and even the headquarters. In essence, the first era was customer-facing. Banks spent the last 15 years persuading customers to stop visiting branches and use online or mobile banking, ATMs, and agency banking. This removed the need for physical interactions, moving a majority of transactions outside bank halls. The first phase of the transition affected only frontline workers, such as tellers. As branch footprints shrank, cash handling declined. But the next stage of automation, as signalled by Stanchart, is more consequential because it targets the institutional backbone inside banks themselves. Banking functions like human resources, compliance, call centres, and customer onboarding employ thousands of people across African markets precisely because banking remains one of the continent’s most administratively complex industries. The sector must navigate fragmented identity systems, cross-border regulations, paper-heavy documentation requirements, anti-money laundering obligations, and diverse payment infrastructures across multiple markets. Historically, a large workforce addressed most of these inefficiencies, but AI now threatens to do so more cheaply. That is the significance of StanChart’s announcement. The bank is arguing that many support functions no longer need to be labour-intensive. For instance, a large language model (LLM) can review documents continuously without overtime costs and flag suspicious transactions faster than human analysts. Automated compliance systems can process vast amounts of regulatory information instantly, while customer-service chatbots can handle thousands of queries simultaneously. What once required floors of junior employees requires software infrastructure supervised by a smaller number of specialists. The middle-class jobs The danger of faster AI adoption in banks for African economies is not simply unemployment. It is the erosion of middle-tier professional work. Banking has historically been one of Africa’s most important engines of the urban middle class. It created structured graduate recruitment pipelines, management-training programmes, pension-backed careers, and relatively stable white-collar employment. Notable African political and business elites passed through banks early in their careers. What AI threatens to remove are precisely the kinds of jobs that created those pathways. These jobs are repetitive enough to automate but skilled enough to have historically supported middle-income urban life. That creates a bigger social risk. If banks continue to earn strong profits while employing significantly fewer people, the sector may cease functioning as a major employer. Banking could resemble the technology sector itself, becoming highly productive and highly profitable while employing small numbers of specialised workers. And transformation may already be underway. Across Kenya’s banking sector, hiring is concentrated around cybersecurity, data engineering, AI, and specialised relationship management rather than traditional operations. Some banks like KCB Group and Equity Group continue expanding overall staff numbers, but the composition of hiring is changing.
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👨🏿🚀TechCabal Daily – Uber-charged for Kenya
In partnership with Lire en Français اقرأ هذا باللغة العربية Happy pre-TGIF. Very few events can earn the tag of unprecedented in Nigeria’s tech ecosystem, especially in the last ten years. If, like us, you have followed the ecosystem religiously in this time, you would have seen it all. Exits, mega-rounds, acquisitions, shutdowns, layoffs, and even the occasional initial public offerings (IPOs). But when Cowrywise, the Nigerian wealth management startup that manages money for two million people, promoted eleven people to the position of associate vice president in January, it earned that tag. Read our in-depth article to understand why the startup made the promotions, why it matters, and what it means for the ecosystem. Get smarter about Francophone Africa with our newsletter, Francophone Weekly—the startups, tech policies, and institutions building the pipelines for ecosystem growth. Subscribe Uber to expand Kenyan operations Amazon Prime launches in South Africa ViaTunisia subsea cable goes live Smartphones to cost Nigerians more World Wide Web 3 Events Ride-hailing Uber wants to double its electric boda fleet in Kenya Uber Electric Boda. Image Source: Uber When Uber, the ride-hailing giant, launched Electric Boda (e-bikes) in Nairobi, Kenya, in August 2023, its pitch was to offer cheaper rides for passengers, lower costs for drivers, and a cleaner city for everyone. By the end of 2024, its e-bike fleet had reportedly completed 94% of its trips since its launch. The company also said its e-boda fleet drove an 81% increase in active driver sign-ups. Seeing the results, Uber will double its electric motorcycle fleet in Kenya by the end of 2026, the clearest sign yet that what started as an experiment has become a core part of how the company wants to grow in that market. Why are Kenyan boda boda gig riders choosing electric? Petrol. Maintenance. Repairs. These three things eat into a rider’s income every day. Electric bikes cut operating costs by an estimated 30–35% compared to petrol. Kenya Power, the country’s electricity distributor, reported KES 382 million ($2.9 million) in EV charging revenue between July 2023 and April 2026, a 113-fold increase from where it started, driven almost entirely by motorcycle charging. Zoom out: Kenya had 35,000 registered EVs by the end of 2025, up from 796 three years earlier. Almost all of them are motorcycles. Uber doubling its fleet doesn’t just grow a product line; it puts more electric bikes on the road in a country where 1.5 million people depend on boda bodas for their livelihood. When Uber scales in Kenya, it scales for them. Money20/20 in Amsterdam Event. Join us for a night of cocktails, conversations, and networking on the sidelines of Money20/20 in Amsterdam. Spaces are limited. RSVP here. Ecommerce Amazon Prime launches in South Africa, offering customers delivery perks Image Source: Andertoons For R59 ($3.6) a month, South Africans can now get same-day or next-day delivery on their Amazon orders, access to Prime Video, cloud gaming, and a front-row seat to Prime Day deals. On Wednesday, Amazon, the Jeff Bezos-founded e-commerce company that expanded to South Africa in May 2024, launched Amazon Prime locally, bringing its flagship membership programme to the country for the first time. An annual plan costs R399 ($24), saving members 44% compared to paying monthly. State of play: The subscription will bundle e-commerce delivery perks, free gaming, and streaming services for South Africans, making it one of the most competitive offerings to land in the market at that price point. Amazon Prime is not new to Africa. Amazon Prime is currently available in 28 countries globally, with monthly prices ranging from $4 to about $8. In Africa, Egypt is the only other market with Prime delivery perks, having launched in 2022, where membership costs EGP 87 ($1.67) every three months or EGP 249 ($4.79) annually. At that price, Egypt’s offering is notably cheaper than South Africa’s. Globally, however, South Africa’s R59 ($3.6) monthly rate sits among the more affordable entry points, with the notable exception that US members, who pay more, get full access to the entire Amazon services ecosystem in return. The service also arrives just in time to rope South Africans into Prime Day, Amazon’s annual global discount event running from June 23 to 26. An attempt to deepen customer loyalty and increase competition: Takealot, which has spent years building its own loyalty and delivery proposition, now faces a better-funded, globally tested version of the same idea. Checkers Sixty60 built its dominance on free delivery and speed. Prime is now in that lane, too. What Amazon is really launching is not a membership programme. It is the infrastructure that made it unbeatable everywhere else, now pointed directly at South Africa’s most competitive consumer categories, all at once. Naira Life 2026 is here! The theme for this year’s Naira Life Conference by Zikoko is “All About Wealth.”Join 2,000+ in Lagos on August 22 for a day of practical money conversations and workshops designed to move you from simply earning an income to building lasting wealth. Get 15% off early bird tickets. Telecoms Tunisia gets a new direct data highway to Europe Image Source: Orange Most people never think about submarine cables until one breaks. Then suddenly the Internet slows down, payments fail, and entire countries start looking for backup routes. On Wednesday, Orange announced that the ViaTunisia subsea cable segment connecting Marseille in France to Bizerte in Tunisia has reached “Ready for Service” status, meaning it is now operational and capable of carrying live traffic. The project forms part of Medusa, a wider Mediterranean cable system that aims to improve connectivity between Europe and North Africa. It all started in 2022: The European Union (EU) agreed to support the project through its Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) programme. ViaTunisia cost €32 million ($37 million) to deploy, with the EU contributing €9.6 million ($11 million) towards construction and management costs. Why Tunisia? Geography. Marseille is an important Internet hub, acting as a gateway for submarine cables that link Europe to Africa, the Middle East, and
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