Exclusive: Chaka founder Tosin Osibodu exits company after Rise merger
Tosin Osibodu, the founder of Chaka, a Nigerian startup that allows retail investors to buy shares from the NYSE and other foreign stock exchanges, has left the business five months after Rise acquired the company. Per his LinkedIn page, Osibodu has joined Alpaca, a company that develops APIs for trading stocks and crypto. Eke Urum, the founder of Rise, is the sole CEO of the recently merged companies. “[Urum] has integrated to build a sum greater than its parts. I’m really excited about the future roadmap of both entities under his leadership,” Osibodu said in a LinkedIn post. Urum, who introduced himself to Chaka users as the new CEO a few weeks ago, told TechCabal that Osibodu is still a shareholder in the company and will continue in an advisory role. “Before he transitioned to Alpaca, we went through a process during which he gradually handed over the day-to-day decision-making of Chaka to me,” Urum told TechCabal. Urum says he is also well supported by former employees of Chaka. “One of them is primarily driving operations with me.” Both founders previously told TechCabal that while Chaka’s ownership and cap table will be updated, its products will remain separate. Osibodu’s departure raises questions regarding whether Chaka and RiseVest will continue to remain separate products or merge. Chaka was founded in 2019 to allow users to buy shares of publicly traded companies in Nigeria and the United States for as little as $2. It became the first trading startup to receive a digital sub-broker licence in March 2021. As Executive Director of Sales for Alpaca, Tosin Osibodu will be working to deepen Alpaca’s footprint in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. The firm currently powers over 130+ investing services for neobanks and wealthtechs. “We are hoping that a three-way partnership [with Rise, Chaka, and Alpaca] will come out of this new working relationship,” Urum told TechCabal.
Read MoreBreaking: Y Combinator latest African pick is Miden, a Nigerian API-fintech startup
Miden, a Nigerian startup that allows businesses to issue virtual cards to their customers through its API, has been selected for Y Combinator’s winter 2024 batch. Miden is the latest Nigerian startup in this year’s winter batch after Cleva, the cross-border payment service. Miden, which provides both USD and Naira virtual cards for businesses, launched in 2022 to solve the operational challenges businesses face managing traditional payment methods, like high transaction fees, complex paperwork, and slow card issuance times. The company’s API-based platform allows businesses to instantly issue virtual cards (USD and Naira denominations) at scale. Per its website, Miden has issued over 100,000 cards and is present across four countries. YC seems to be backing remittance startups on the continent for this year’s winter batch. Cleva, the first disclosed startup, creates dollar accounts to help individuals and businesses receive international payments. YC made a similar bet in its 2022 winter batch, selecting Grey, a Nigeria startup providing foreign accounts for users; Bloom, a Sudanese startup; Plumter, a Nigerian API provider for cross-border payment; Nash a Kenyan fintech for borderless and Lenco, a Nigerian fintech. In 2023, the accelerator selected Vault Pay, a payments infrastructure company from DRC Congo, Nigeria’s food delivery startup ChowCentral and Rwanda’s Eden Care. *This is a developing story
Read MoreFintechs brace for competition as Nigerian banks charge into digital lending market
Nigerian traditional banks are making a push into the digital lending market in a move that will pitch them against their digital competitors. For the banks considering this move, a standalone digital lending app means they can acquire customers from smaller banks with high interest rates. Customers of other digital lenders may also be there for the taking, considering that most traditional banks have the cheapest lending rates in the market. On January 17, TechCabal reported that Access Holding Plc, the parent company of Access Bank, received approval in principle from the Central Bank to launch Oxygen X, a standalone lending product. While Access is the first holding company to make a play for standalone digital lending, other banks are in talks to spin off standalone digital lending services, a highly-placed industry source told TechCabal. “Banks may launch their apps, but they don’t have the mastery of execution that fintechs have,” said the source who asked not to be identified. “Banks will possibly drop the ball. I am not betting on any banks to win in the market.” That argument isn’t new. When traditional banks began a push into fintech, the consensus from fintech insiders was that the banks didn’t have the operational chops to mount a challenge. But Habari Pay, the fintech arm of Guaranty Trust Holding Company (GTCO), posted profits of ₦1.3 billion in the first half of 2023, according to GTCO’s financial report. It also may be premature to write off the big banks given that QuickCredit, arguably the most innovative lending product in the last few years, has come from the banks. Will banks change their approach to retail lending? While one of the core mandates of commercial banks is to lend, they don’t give out a lot of loans, especially to individuals and small businesses (retail lending). Rather than serve a mass market with a high risk of defaults, banks would instead give loans to high-quality borrowers such as salary earners with credible employers. A former bank executive argues that the entry of traditional banks into the digital lending market will only be a game-changer if the banks abandon the old lending and leverage data philosophy. “For me, the big question is, what will be different? What is the play? Is it lower rates and faster returns? One advantage banks have is that they can unlock customers’ data to make lending decisions,” he said. Nigeria’s digital lending market is dominated by startups like Carbon, FairMoney, and OPay, serving a growing mass of digital-first customers. There are about 211 licensed digital lenders in Nigeria, according to the country’s digital lending regulator, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC). The selling point for these startups is the simplified lending process, allowing people to get loans in a few minutes and less stringent KYC requirements. But easier means more expensive. Many digital lenders offer loans with interests as high as 30% per annum, while banks like GTBank—through its digital lending platform QuickCredit—offer around 21%. The difference in interest rates often comes down to the cost of financing. While traditional banks have trillions of Naira in customer deposits to lend from, fintech startups often draw on debt or venture funding. Beyond this, digital lenders don’t have as many data points to make loan decisions, meaning slightly more risk. These risks are baked into the interest rates. The cost of loan recovery is also one key issue lenders have to deal with. As one industry insider put it, traditional banks “can’t do the rough things,” referring to some digital lenders’ questionable loan recovery methods. One thing is clear: traditional banks offer lower interest rates to beat fintechs. Whether they can change their lending strategies remains to be seen.
Read MoreNext Wave: Innovation theatre
Cet article est aussi disponible en français <!– In partnership with –> <!–TopBanner Join us for TechCabal Battlefield, Moonshot’s startup competition where you can showcase your startup idea to a global audience and an esteemed panel of judges and stand a chance to win up to 2.5 million naira in funding for your business! Click to register for TC Battlefield First published 28 January, 2024 We reached the max tolerance for innovation theatre. What comes next? Entrepreneurs, investors, an uncritical media, and government are guilty of what Steve Blank, the Stanford University professor of entrepreneurship, calls “innovation theatre”—a body of initiatives we do and promote to signal that innovation is happening, but which doesn’t translate to significant business value or economic impact. Innovation theatre is pretty easy to spot, but in good times, most people are content to live and let live. When things take a bad turn, though, theatrics tend to disappear in a huff. It’s why people are losing faith in things like acceleratorships, and why more venture capital investors are struggling with an identity crisis and narrative collapse. Innovation theatrics are not unique to Africa, and these days, it is common to call it out. What is replacing it, though, is a cynical defeatism that is no better, if not simply worse. The chart below is popular in Nigerian tech circles. It is from a 2020 article by Jake Kendall, one of our friends at DFSLab, and it became popular in 2022 after Stears used the chart in an article and more recently in 2023. It’s a brilliant read and a good addition to resources for framing your thinking and approach to African markets as an investor or a founder. But I have always been bewildered by the viral conversations that it sparked on social media. The key lesson for most seemed to be, “Africans are poor. Don’t waste your time”, and similar statements. For me, the key takeaway of the chart (and the entire piece) is simply that we’ve reached a maximum tolerance level for efficiency and sustaining innovations that rode the mobile/smartphone boom in Africa. Kendall’s article did a great job of sketching the broad contours for consumer business modelling. But if an entrepreneur building a consumer product looks at it and decides to go build something on a B2B model instead, it tells me two things: (1) Technology is only marginally relevant to what she was working on. (2) The type of innovation being proposed is simply an attempt to profit from naked arbitrage in supply chains by offering what the late Clay Christensen called, “efficiency innovation” or “sustaining” innovation. This is not to say that one cannot build a good business on top of that economic model—it is possible. However, I believe it’s a mistake to let just that outline the definitive shape of your vision for consumer markets if you are a founder or an investor. Why? Because you may just be confusing the naturally limited market of innovation that improves a product, for the more intensive creation process of innovation that creates new markets. And I’ll be frank. “Market creating innovation” is a hard thing. That is why the examples are few and far between. Innovation that creates markets What was the purchasing power of Africans when mobile telephony first took off on the continent? I’m still looking for the answer, but if I were a betting man, I’d wager it was significantly lower than the figures from the 2011–2015 PovCal data upon which (most of) the earlier mentioned chart is based. The arguments of today about low purchasing power are strangely similar to the arguments of then. In the 1990s Africa was a poor continent, and the time did not look right for mass-market telephony. The difference, though, was not just the new cellular technology operating over the GSM standard. There was also institutional reform in telecoms governance at the political level. And, most importantly, what made it all workable was the new type of distribution, pricing and services that met latent demand. Kendall and the DFSLab team are quite right when they say that the fortune is probably at the middle of the pyramid where people earn between $4 to $8. Taking 2022 quarterly results from MTN Group, Africa’s largest telecommunications company, average revenue per user (ARPU) across its 17 African markets has a mean value of $3.5 in pure dollar terms, i.e. not adjusted for purchasing power parity. MTN and its peers certainly did not start their business targeting a mean ARPU of $3.5 across Africa. It was certainly much lower when the company started. So, simply targeting the same ARPU to make your business economics work or investment thesis work in the long term appears to be flawed to me, regardless of whether it’s consumer or business-to-business. The major exception to this is if what you are creating and advocating for is an efficiency or a sustaining innovation. And if it is, we should be clear about it upfront. 2023 was a watershed year for African technology startups. It was the year Instadeep got acquired by BioNTech for $682 million in Africa’s largest-ever acquisition deal. It was the year tech startups in Africa shed more than 1,500 jobs in industry-wide layoffs as 15 startups which raised $214 million in funding shut down. It was the year African startups raised $2.748 billion across 500 deals. And more! It will be remembered as the year that reset the trajectory (hopefully) for the better. Download the full report from our research team at TC Insights to learn more. Every innovation that created or unlocked new markets has been epochal or at least a part of a mega-trend or supercycle. We seem to have forgotten this. Supercycles are, in the world of commodity trading, a decade(s)-long period of extraordinary prices where old price expectations are reset and new anchors weighed. For our purposes, a supercycle is the early buildup of long-term consumer trends and economic activity where the key metric
Read More👨🏿🚀 TechCabal Daily – B.TECH denies hack
In partnership with Share this newsletter: Lire en Français اقرأ هذا باللغة العربية Good morning 2023 was a watershed year for African tech. $2.748 billion was raised across 500 deals, and this includes Africa’s largest-ever acquisition deal: Instadeep’s acquisition by BioNTech for $682 million. In more sombre news, over 1,500 tech workers were laid off in Africa in 2023, while 15 startups which raised $214 million in funding shut down. Learn more about the major trends that shaped African tech in 2023 by downloading The State of Tech in Africa report here. In today’s edition Access completes third acquisition of the month B.TECH denies data breach Livestock Wealth insists its licence is valid Ten Nigerian startups awarded $11,000 Which sector got the least funding in 2023? The World Wide Web3 Opportunities M&As Access completes third acquisition of the month The African tech ecosystem continues to witness significant M&A activities—one of the trends we highlighted in our State of Tech in Africa report. In 2023, 30 acquisitions took place, including Bitmama’s acquisition of PayDay. Commercial banks are however way ahead of startups in this M&A game. Take Nigeria’s Access HoldCo, for example. Over the weekend, the bank completed its third acquisition of the month. It acquired Nigeria’s second-largest independent pension fund manager, ARM Pensions. Over the past two years, the company has made six significant acquisitions ranging from its 2021 acquisitions of the Mozambiquan and Botswana arms of BancABC to the 2022 acquisition of Finibanco Angola. These strategic acquisitions have helped the bank expand into new countries. More than traditional banking: ARM will be Access’ third acquisition this month—with Zambia’s Atlas Mara and Megatech Insurance as the first two—and the third overall that showcases the bank’s strong venture into other plays like insurance and pension. In 2022, Access HoldCo solidified its position in the $34.9 billion pension market with the acquisitions of Sigma Pensions and First Guarantee Pensions. Over the weekend, the company also revealed that it had received all regulatory approvals from the Nigerian Pension Commission and the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission to acquire ARM Pensions. Now, ARM’s four million customers will move to join the one million customers registered under Access’s pension plan. Access payments with Moniepoint Moniepoint has made it simple for your business to access payments while providing access to credit and other business tools. Open an account today here. Cybersecurity B.TECH denies data breach Last Friday, a cybercriminal known as “Tanaka” leaked a database which allegedly contains the personal information of over 200,000 users of Egyptian consumer retailer B.TECH. The database, which is about 20MB in size and contains over 200,000 lines of data, includes emails, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, genders, and city of residence. According to cybersecurity tracker HackManac, the hack actually occurred over a year ago, in February 2023. It never happened? B.TECH says a data breach never happened. In a statement it shared with The Enterprise yesterday, the company said it “firmly denies all circulated allegations of a recent data breach”. Millions at risk: The allegations are concerning as B.TECH is one of Egypt’s leading consumer retailers with over 50 million customers across 130 cities. While the company has reassured its users, stating that their HackManac says they should apply caution moving forward. The big bucks in data: While South Africa still records some of the highest cyberattacks on the continent, Egypt has received its fair share of hackers with Lockbit, an infamous cybercriminal group, hacking Fawry last year. These hackers make money: by demanding a ransom from the company which costs an average of $1.82 million and by selling the data to other phishing groups which attack and defraud the users by pretending to be legitimate companies. Secure payment gateway for your business Fincra’s payment gateway enables you to easily collect Naira payments as a business; you can collect payments in minutes through bank transfers, cards, virtual accounts and mobile money. Create a free account and start collecting NGN payments with Fincra. Startups Livestock Wealth’s insists its licence is valid The News: Livestock Wealth, a South African agritech platform which allows investors to buy cattle and farmland, faces accusations of operating without a financial service provider (FSP) licence from the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA). Despite the allegations, the startup’s lead investor, Mineworkers Investment Company (MIC), claims it conducted thorough due diligence. The startup is also disputing the FSCA’s allegations, and claims to have the necessary credit provider licence. Background: Livestock Wealth gained traction through AlphaCode Incubate, a programme supporting black-owned financial and tech startups. They received initial funding in 2016 and an additional R2 million ($106,000) grant in 2019 after pivoting their model to become the cattle farm operator and supplier to a major retailer. AlphaCode, in a statement to TechCabal, also claims it investigated Livestock Wealth in 2019. Why it matters: The licensing issue raises concerns about investor protection and transparency in Africa’s fledgling tech ecosystem which has seen a fair bit of scrutiny in the past year. MIC’s stance of following due diligence could reassure potential investors, but the FSCA’s investigation casts a shadow on the company’s compliance. The accusations come at a critical juncture for Livestock Wealth’s expansion into farmland investing. The outcome of the FSCA investigation and potential penalties could significantly impact their trajectory. Accept fast in-person payments, at scale Spin up a sales force with dozens – even hundreds – of Virtual Terminal accounts in seconds, without the headache of managing physical hardware. Learn more → Funding Ten agritech startups awarded $11,000 from 4IRTA The year 2022 saw an estimated 17 million Nigerians grappling with critical food insecurity, and an estimated 25 million Nigerians were likely to be food insecure between June and August of 2023, according to October Cadre Harmonise, a government-led and UN-supported food and nutrition analysis. Nigeria’s recognises the critical threat of food insecurity and has prioritised cultivating 500,000 hectares of land across Nigeria. In line with this vision, the Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, last
Read MoreTakealot appoints new CEO as Amazon arrival looms
Takealot Group has announced the appointment of Frederik Zietsman as new CEO. Takealot, the South African e-commerce group that reported $808m in revenues for 2023, has announced Frederik Zietsman as its new CEO effective from February 1, 2024. Takealot group owns the online platforms takealot.com, Superbalist, and Mr D. Zietsman replaces Mamongae Mahlare who was CEO from October 2021. Mahlare is moving to the position of executive chair of Takealot group. Zietsman was CEO of Takealot.com from 2021. “The streamlining of the leadership between the group and Takealot.com will reinforce resources around its flagship online retail and marketplace platform and bring stronger alignment and focus in delivering on its key growth objectives,” Takealot said in a statement. In 2018, Africa’s biggest company by market capitalisation Naspers acquired Tiger Global Management’s stake in Takealot, effectively owning 96% of Takealot. Per Nasper’s latest financials, Takealot group’s gross merchandise value (GMV) and revenue grew by 15% and 9% over the last year, respectively. The company also reduced trading losses by as much as 85%. Takealot facing regulatory crackdown and Amazon arrival Amazon announced in October 2023 that it will launch its marketplace in South Africa in 2024, looking set to challenge Takealot’s dominance. Although the company did not cite the arrival as the reason for the executive shuffle, Takealot would be looking to get its best bets at the helm to fight off the global e-commerce giant. Former CEO Mahlare has constantly reiterated that Takealot actually looks forward to the imminent arrival of Amazon. Amazon enters a South African e-commerce market fraught with regulatory complications. In July, the country’s competition regulator released a report outlining the findings of an investigation into competitive practices of some leading online platforms. For Takealot, the regulator stated that the platform faced a conflict of interest on its site as its retail division competes with the marketplace sellers leading to behaviour that has disadvantaged sellers. As a remedial action, Takealot was ordered to segregate its retail division from its marketplace operations, preventing its retail services from accessing seller data and unilaterally stopping sellers from competing for certain brands.
Read MoreExclusive: Moniepoint processed more than 5 billion transactions in 2023
Moniepoint, one of Nigeria’s biggest payments startups, had a triumphant 2023 despite the multiple issues that plagued the country’s financial services industry. The fintech startup averaged 433 million monthly transactions across its web, mobile, card and in-person payment channels and closed the year with 5.2 billion transactions, according to an internal company presentation seen by TechCabal. The value of those transactions was over $150 billion. It represents a 205% increase from 2022, when the startup processed 1.7 billion transactions worth over $100 billion. Moniepoint’s numbers are impressive compared to the transactions NIBSS — operator of Nigeria’s real-time payment infrastructure — handled in 2023. According to data seen by TechCabal, NIBSS processed 9.6 billion transactions, which were worth ₦600 trillion. Moniepoint’s numbers (5.2 billion) represent almost half of the transactions NIBSS processed, emphasising how 2023 was Nigeria’s best year for digital payments since 2020. However, looking eastward, Moniepoint’s transaction volume is dwarfed by MPesa, Kenya’s largest payment processor. The Kenyan payment giant processed 12.93 billion transactions from April to September 2023, more than double Moniepoint’s 2023 numbers. This might explain why Moniepoint is expanding to Kenya. Access HoldCo in final stages of regulatory approval to acquire ARM Pensions Moniepoint: From a small startup to a payment behemoth Moniepoint has grown from a little-known banking software development company that developed products for Nigerian banks to a payment behemoth. The startup says it currently has more than 2 million business accounts on its platform, most of which are business accounts. In August 2023, Moniepoint ventured into the personal banking space. At the time, Ope Adeyemi, Moniepoint’s senior vice president for channels and sales tools, told TechCabal that the fintech had 800,000 POS terminals actively used daily nationwide. The startup currently runs its ubiquitous agency banking product, Moniepoint, an online payment gateway Monnify, and its personal banking product. Through these products, users can pay for bills and airtime, transfer money to bank accounts or POS devices, and pay with cards. Business owners can also manage their businesses with the startup’s features, like tax management, compliance, payroll and expense management, and receiving loans. Moniepoint’s business customers are in different sectors. Still, the majority of their business users come from the retail sector (38.29%), food and drinks (17.77%), oil and gas (9.11%), IT and electronics (6.12%), beauty and personal care (4.5%), and agriculture (4%). Moniepoint’s bird-eye view When you process these many transactions daily, you can get a birds-eye view of how Nigerians move money daily. Sundays are the peak time for food purchases in Nigeria, typically between 7-8 p.m., according to company data seen by TechCabal. Nigerians also bought ₦100 worth of airtime 63 million times, making it the most popular amount for airtime transactions. Nigerian election periods are usually mired with violence, and 2023 was no exception. The fear of this violence leads Nigerians to stock up on food and other provisions. According to Moniepoint, this also extends to bill payments. The day before Nigeria’s 2023 general elections, it processed the highest bill payments for cable and electricity subscriptions in an hour.
Read MoreExclusive: We did our due diligence, says Livestock Wealth investors
Livestock Wealth’s lead investor has stated that it did the requisite due diligence before investing R10 million (~$530,000) into the company. The agritech startup, which allows investors to make investments in livestock and farmland, is accused of operating without licensing by South Africa’s financial services regulator. Mineworkers Investment Company (MIC), which has a net asset value of over R7 billion, (~$373 million) has stated that it performed due diligence before investing in embroiled South African agritech startup Livestock Wealth. The startup is facing allegations of operating without licensing and using another entity’s license number by the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA). The startup has disputed those allegations. In October 2022, MIC, through its Khulisani Ventures investment arm, invested R10 million (~$500,000) into Livestock Wealth for a 5% equity stake as part of the startup’s seed round. “We followed our internal due diligence process for MIC Khulisani Ventures,” said Oren Fuchs, senior stakeholder manager at MIC. “The matters raised by the FSCA were not flagged in this initial process.” According to its website, MIC Khulisani Ventures is a R150 million (~$8 million) early-stage investment vehicle that invests inblack-owned innovative, high-growth businesses in South Africa. It invests up to R30 million (~$1.6 million) in such startups. MIC added that it has engaged the company’s management team to fully understand the matter and how they plan to resolve it. Another investor also says due diligence was done In 2019, as part of Rand Merchants International’s AlphaCode Incubate program, Livestock Wealth received a R2 million (~$106,000) additional grant as part of the program’s enterprise supplier development (ESD) initiative which sought to support early-stage, high-potential, black-owned financial services and/or technology firms. When the startup initially joined the incubator in 2016, it was a crowd-farming platform that connected cattle farmers to retail investors and received an unspecified amount of grant funding. According to Dominique Collet, founding partner of AlphaCode, after the initial grant funding, Livestock Wealth was considered for additional funding and extensive due diligence was conducted. Collet adds that Livestock Wealth had pivoted its business model with the company becoming the farmer that leases and operates the cattle farms, to ensure that the cows were managed in farms that they have complete control of. With these controls in place, they had become a supplier to a large retailer of beef. “At the time of conducting the legal and regulatory due diligence in 2019, it was not determined that Livestock Wealth required a [financial service provider] licence to conduct the activities it was conducting at that time. It did require a [credit provider] licence which they had,” Collet said in a statement to TechCabal. The due diligence, according to Collet, also concluded that Livestock Wealth held sufficient insurance to cover the services they were offering per regulatory requirements. Livestock Wealth allows users to invest in individual cattle or pregnant cows and claims to provide returns of between 10-15% per annum from the sale of meat. The startup earns a commission with each transaction. The accusations come at a time when the startup is expanding its model to farmlands.
Read MoreAccess HoldCo in final stages of regulatory approval to acquire ARM Pensions
Access HoldCo, the parent company of Access Bank, Nigeria’s largest lender by assets, is in the final stages of receiving regulatory approval from the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NGX) and the Nigerian Pension Commission to acquire ARM Pensions, Nigeria’s second-largest independent pension fund manager with over $2 billion of pension assets under management (AUM), a person with first-hand knowledge of the deal said. When fully approved, Access HoldCo plans to integrate ARM Pensions with its existing pension business, positioning itself as a dominant player in the $34.9 billion pension market, potentially challenging Stanbic IBTC for the top spot. Access HoldCo, originally a Pension custodian, bought Sigma Pension and First Guarantee Pension last year and merged them into Access Pension. Two regulatory bodies are scrutinizing the deal, looking out for financial stability and pensioner protection. While the NGX will assess the proposed acquisition through the lens of its listing rules and issuer guidelines, PenCom’s primary objective will be the interests of ARM Pensions’ contributors and beneficiaries, one pension fund manager who asked not to be named said. The planned acquisition has not been without its share of drama, with one publication reporting the deal as completed on Wednesday evening. Social media conversations also swirled around the acquisition, putting Access HoldCo, a publicly listed company, at risk of hefty fines from regulators, one bank executive claimed. It sent Access HoldCo into overdrive, with the company’s board holding two separate meetings on Thursday, one person in those meetings told TechCabal. ARM also held a company-wide meeting on Thursday to inform about the potential acquisition, one person in that meeting said while declining to share specifics. Founded in 2005, ARM Pensions offers a comprehensive range of pension products and services to both individuals and corporate clients. Its strong brand reputation and expertise in investment management have made it a trusted partner for millions of Nigerians saving for their retirement.
Read More👨🏿🚀TechCabal Daily – Mafab to launch 5G later this year
In partnership with Share this newsletter: Lire en Français اقرأ هذا باللغة العربية TGIF What are you doing later today? We’re going to be launching our comprehensive roundup of funding, acquisitions, and significant developments in Africa’s tech ecosystem for Q4, 2023. Join Moses Kemibaro, Nadayar Enegesi, and Ory Okolloh as they discuss The State of Tech Report for Q4 2023 by 11 AM (WAT) today. Want to attend? Click this link to register. In today’s edition Mafab to launch 5G later this year Nigerian agencies to spend $9.6 million on software Sama’s head is in the clouds Netflix records $8.8 billion in revenue Funding tracker The World Wide Web3 Events Telecom Nigeria has a new telco on the horizon Nigeria’s 5G scene has seen its fair share of interest with big telecoms like Airtel or MTN snapping up licences two years ago. One interesting bit, though, is that both telecoms will soon find themselves competing with a newcomer: Mafab Communications. Nigeria’s telecom regulator has announced that Mafab plans to launch its services later this year, which would increase the total number of telecom players to five, with three telecoms—MTN, Mafab and Airtel—offering 5G services. In December 2021, Mafab secured a 5G licence with a $273.6 million bid. Now, the Lagos-based telecom is set to launch 5G services across Nigeria, with about 30 cities currently boasting such coverage in the country. Unlike counterparts like MTN known for infrastructure sharing with IHS Towers, Mafab chose to build its network from the ground up, which required navigating regulatory hurdles like securing a Universal Access Service License (UASL) licence—an operational licence for the 5G spectrum, which cost ₦374.6 million ($415,521). Having secured the UASL licence in July 2022, Mafab now faces the task of investing billions to build its network infrastructure. Failed market entry attempts: After missing the August 24, 2022 deadline set by Nigeria’s telecom regulator to roll out the network across the country, the telco was granted a five-month extension to begin its own roll-out. However, there have been inconsistencies. Despite targeting six cities—Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Kano, and Kaduna—for initial deployment, its 2023 launch in Abuja and Lagos, which was also an unveiling event of its new logo and brand name, Mcom, lacked concrete product demonstrations and a definitive launch date. The recent push to sell 5G routers before a confirmed network launch also raised questions about their readiness to hit the ground running. Zoom out: For MTN, who won the auction for the 3.5GHz 5G spectrum alongside Mafab, the telco became the first to roll out 5G in Nigeria and is now present in 13 cities and over 700 sites in Nigeria. Access payments with Moniepoint Moniepoint has made it simple for your business to access payments while providing access to credit and other business tools. Open an account today here. Public Sector Nigeria government agencies to spend $9.6 million on software Two key government agencies in Nigeria will spend a combined sum of ₦8.7 billion ($9.6 million) on software this year. The Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC)—the body responsible for safeguarding your bank deposits—and the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Nigeria’s tax office will spend ₦5.2 billion ($5.7 million) and ₦3.5 billion ($3.5 million) respectively on software it needs to run this year. The price isn’t right: While the price tag might have you howling, Nigeria has a long history of spending huge sums on software. Last year, it forked out ₦105.25 billion ($116 million) for BVAS Biometric tablets, the tech that allowed for voter verification during its last elections. One report revealed that the tablets were overpriced and surpassed market estimates by 30.4%. While the need for robust software for these agencies is undeniably evident, it still requires scrutiny as Nigerian agencies haven’t always gotten the tech right. The Nigerian government also approved ₦2.8 billion ($3.1 million) for digital census software for its 2023 census which it has postponed on multiple occasions. Several of the country’s agency websites are either inoperable or clunky. More spends: The National Pension Commission (NPC) and the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC), have also budgeted ₦384 million ($498,000) and ₦255 million ($287,000) respectively for software acquisition this year. That’s a total of ₦9.3 billion ($10.4 million) across four agencies. Secure payment gateway for your business Fincra payment gateway enables you to easily collect Naira payments as a business; you can collect payments in minutes through cards, bank transfers and PayAttitude. Create a free account and start collecting NGN payments with Fincra. Cloud computing Sama activates multi-cloud integration in Kenya In 2023, Sama started the year with its head stuck in a cloud of lawsuits between its former content moderators and Meta. The company, which had ended its content moderation partnership with Meta, had to fire over 230 employees with whom it’s now locked in a court battle. This year, though, Sama’s head is in a different type of cloud. The platform which preps datasets for AI training, ensuring models meet high accuracy standards, now connects to three cloud storage providers: AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Customers can now keep their data on their preferred cloud and Sama can still access it securely, train their models faster and more efficiently. What’s more, the new integration has rolled out in Kenya. With multi-cloud integrations, customer onboarding time reduces to one day, expediting the entire process by up to seven times. High cloud bills are a concern: Remember the Twiga Foods saga in Kenya? Where Twiga owed Incentro, a Google cloud reseller $261,000 in unpaid invoices. High data transfer charges and complex integrations can quickly burn through budgets. With Sama’s multi-cloud integration, your data stays on your chosen cloud platform (AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure), potentially lowering data transfer and development expenses. Zoom out: In Kenya, the activation is supported by Safaricom Fiber Optic connectivity links, which enable the download and upload speeds required for Machine Learning models to operate well. 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