Kenya’s Central Bank is hiring for crypto compliance roles as landmark regulation nears
The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) is hiring for senior and managerial roles to oversee licencing and compliance for virtual asset service providers (VASPs), even as the regulations governing the sector are still being finalised. On Monday, the regulator posted four positions within its Digital Payment Services Division on its careers portal, all closing May 18. The roles span licencing, product approval, and compliance oversight of virtual asset service providers. It is the first time the regulator has advertised roles specifically dedicated to VASPs, a sign that it is assembling capacity ahead of what could be an imminent regulatory rollout. A manager-level hire would lead the licencing function, reviewing applications, recommending approvals or rejections, and developing standard operating procedures for the new VASP regime. Two deputy manager positions would respectively handle licencing and product approval, and oversight and compliance, the latter focused on risk-based supervision of licenced VASPs, including anti-money laundering (AML) checks, cybersecurity assessments, and enforcement of licencing conditions. A senior business analyst role rounds out the team, focused on application review and regulatory guidance for incoming VASP applicants. The hiring comes seven months after Kenya’s parliament passed the Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) Act in October 2025, which for the first time created a legal framework for the country’s crypto sector. Under that law, the CBK will oversee virtual assets used for payments, carving out a market where crypto-linked remittances and mobile money integrations have grown steadily. Yet, the subordinate regulations needed to actually operationalise that law are still not in place. The National Treasury drafted the VASP Regulations in March and opened them for public comment until April 10. They have yet to be gazetted. The regulations, as drafted, propose a 13-member inter-agency Coordination Committee on which the CBK sits alongside other state agencies—including the Capital Markets Authority (CMA), the Financial Reporting Centre (FRC), and the National Computer and Cybercrimes Coordination Committee (NC4)—a structure meant to manage oversight across the various use cases of virtual assets. With the comment period closed and the regulations still pending, the hiring suggests the CBK is building internal capacity ahead of implementation. All four roles require backgrounds spanning payments, banking operations, financial services, or law, with the more senior positions demanding familiarity with anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing frameworks and international VASP standards. Kenya joins a growing list of African countries, including Rwanda and Ghana, moving to bring crypto under formal oversight, but the gap between legislating and regulating remains a challenge across the continent. For now, the CBK is hiring, with or without the rulebook fully written.
Read MoreRack Centre to train engineers as Nigeria’s data centre talent shortage grows
Rack Centre, a Lagos-based Tier III carrier and cloud-neutral data centre facility, is launching a structured training programme for university students and engineering graduates to expand Nigeria’s technical workforce. The programme will kick off on Wednesday. The move comes as demand for data infrastructure grows alongside cloud adoption and AI workloads. While new facilities are being built—bringing the number of operational data centres in Africa to 249 as of February 2026—operators say the supply of engineers needed to manage critical systems, particularly power and cooling, has not kept pace. “There’s a lot of recycling of the same people across companies,” Adebola Adefarati, Rack Centre’s head of marketing and communications, told TechCabal on Monday. “People move from one data centre or telco to another, and it becomes a closed loop. The industry has to start creating new talent.” A survey by the Africa Data Centre Association suggests that 67% of data centre operators in Nigeria identify talent retention as a major challenge. In comparison, more than 60% rely on informal, in-house training to keep operations running. Globally, the workforce deficit is even more pronounced, with projections from Uptime Institute intelligence pointing to a need for 2.5 million additional data centre professionals by 2025. In Africa, the issue is compounded by a mix of limited specialised training, aggressive local hiring, and international poaching. Engineers trained to operate in high-stress environments like Lagos—where unreliable grid power and high ambient temperatures are the norm—are particularly attractive to global employers. “Once people gain experience running reliable systems in Nigeria, they become prime targets,” Adefarati said. “We’ve seen a number of our own people leave for opportunities abroad.” Rack Centre’s response is to build a broader pipeline rather than compete for the same limited pool. Data centres require relatively small teams, but with highly specialised expertise. Much of the infrastructure is automated, so staffing needs are low—typically 30 to 100+ people for a 100MW facility. For a 13.5MW site like Rack Centre’s, the workforce is even smaller at about 65 full-time staff, including technicians, engineers, and management, meaning the company cannot absorb all the talent it trains and expects graduates to be distributed across the industry. The programme will train between 15 and 20 engineers in its first cohort, with only a fraction expected to be absorbed internally. The rest will be absorbed by other operators within the data centre ecosystem and telecom operators. Participants will undergo two certification tracks, including one delivered in partnership with Schneider Electric’s training platform, followed by an advanced course and a one-month internship inside a live facility. The full programme runs for four to five months. Training costs, estimated at $2,500 per participant, are fully subsidised, reflecting a broader industry consensus that individuals cannot shoulder the financial burden of specialised certification, according to Adefarati. “The issue is not that people aren’t studying engineering,” he said. “It’s that they’re not trained to work on systems that must run 100% of the time. Data centres are different. You’re dealing with redundant power, precision cooling, and real-time fault detection in a highly sensitive environment.” That complexity is especially pronounced in Nigeria, where maintaining uptime requires adapting global standards to local realities, like hot environments. Cooling systems, for instance, must operate efficiently in temperatures that can exceed 40°C, while power infrastructure must compensate for an inconsistent grid supply. Rack Centre’s programme is being developed in collaboration with the Africa Data Centres Association, which is working toward a broader goal of training up to 1,000 data centre professionals over the next two years. The effort aligns with a wider industry push toward a “source-train-place” model, designed to create a continuous pipeline of talent rather than episodic hiring. The programme also targets structural imbalances within the workforce. Women remain significantly underrepresented in core operational roles, accounting for as little as 5% of technical staff in some facilities. Rack Centre says it aims to ensure that at least one-third of participants in each cohort are female. “Data centres are often seen as hardware,” Adefarati said. “But their success is fundamentally about people.”
Read MoreBotswana Tech Fund sees opportunity where African venture capital rarely flows
For the seventh consecutive year, the Big Four (Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa) pulled in over 80% of all venture capital deployed across Africa in 2025, a share that has barely moved since 2019. But last year, South Africa alone took 19% of the total, and 29% of all African equity funding, making it the largest equity market on the continent. Beyond Johannesburg and Cape Town, the rest of Southern Africa, like Gaborone, Lusaka, Windhoek, Maputo, Luanda and Harare, captured almost nothing. For exits, the gap is even wider, as nearly half of the 138 venture-backed exits tracked by the African Private Capital Association across Africa between 2019 and 2024 were in South Africa. The country’s deep and more liquid capital markets, established secondary structures, and concentration of strategic acquirers have made it the default exit jurisdiction for the continent. As a result, founders building elsewhere in Southern Africa often look to South Africa when seeking capital or planning an exit. Botswana Tech Fund, a new fund anchored out of Guernsey, a self-governing British Crown dependency in the English Channel, is trying to change that. Backed by Stephen Lansdown, the British billionaire who co-founded Hargreaves Lansdown, the FTSE 100 financial services firm, and who has invested in Botswana since 2007 through his Tuli Conservation Trust, the fund has £10 million ($13.5 million) in committed capital, with a first close of £5 million ($6.7 million). It is operationally based in Botswana and run in partnership with Launch Africa, the pan-African seed-stage VC firm with over 130 portfolio startups. Martin Davis, the fund’s co-founder, is a UK technology investor and entrepreneur who also chairs Bethnal Green Ventures, a London-based social impact accelerator that has run programmes for 15 years. His co-lead, Florence Bavanandan, is head of platform and operations at Launch Africa, where she helped build the fund’s portfolio support infrastructure. Together, they have designed a multi-stage strategy with three legs: a pre-seed accelerator that will deploy £100,000 ($135,000) cheques to roughly 100 Southern African-based companies over five years; primary growth-stage investments of £500,000 ($670,000) to £2 million ($2.7 million); and secondaries that buy out early-stage VCs from already-developed companies in the bigger African markets. The geographic focus is what makes the fund unusual. Most African VCs follow the well-known capital concentration map in Lagos, Nairobi, Cairo, and Cape Town. Botswana Tech Fund is built around what Davis and Bavanandan call the “digital gap”: the Southern African markets that get less than a fifth of the continent’s funding despite collectively housing tens of millions of consumers and a younger, increasingly digital population. Their bet is that closing the gap requires capital deployed at the source, not routed through Johannesburg or filtered through Big Four ecosystems where most of the deal flow already lives. In this week’s Ask an Investor, Davis and Bavanandan explain why the fund is anchored in Botswana rather than Lagos or Nairobi, what they look for in founders at the pre-seed stage, why they expect haircuts on every secondary they touch, and why they believe the next decade of African private equity will be dominated by international PE money looking for roll-ups. This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and length. What’s the fund’s thesis, and what type of founder are you looking for? The thesis is pretty simple. I don’t need to tell you about the attractiveness of the African market for developing technology and digitisation—high-growth population, rising urbanisation, digital leapfrogging—all of that is happening within African markets. Right now is ripe for the digitisation of Africa. Some nations are further forward than others, and there’s definitely an increasing gap. What we’re looking to do with our fund is help accelerate the areas where digitisation has been slow and inevitably close that gap. We’re focusing on the critical core markets where this is the case. We’re centred in Botswana but also looking at other Southern African countries like Zambia, Namibia, Mozambique, Angola, and Zimbabwe. The countries are where we feel that over the next decade, there’s going to be a significant move forward in technology being applied to advance digitisation across the entire economy. This is important for a couple of reasons. One is that only by digitising the economy will the economy speed up its development and build economic growth. With a rising younger population, that’s particularly important in this part of Africa. The other side is that economic growth creates opportunities for people to stay in the countries where they were brought up, rather than facing the dilemma of becoming economic migrants to other parts of the continent or the world. We are providing the capital to allow talented entrepreneurs and engineers in those markets to build digital capabilities at home, with principally international capital, to help digitise the economy and close that digital gap. We’re talking about software technology applied at whatever stage capital is required, because it’s not always early stage or late stage. The other thing is that the beauty of software is that it flattens the world. We believe the next Mark Zuckerberg could come from Africa, and there’s no reason why it can’t come from one of the SADC countries. With the technological infrastructure and the governmental support to build digital capabilities, there’s no reason why the next entrepreneur to build a multi-billion-dollar company can’t come from this environment. The only reason it won’t is if they haven’t got the capital to start. That’s what we’re trying to do. What’s the geographical focus, and why Botswana? Southern Africa countries—particularly those centred around Botswana, but also Namibia, Zambia, Mozambique, Angola, and Zimbabwe—are the principal focus, because that’s where we see the greatest digital gap. That’s the geographic focus, and that’s where we want to provide the capital to help build economic growth. The fund is based in Botswana because that’s where the most progress has been made and where the greatest infrastructure exists. Maybe Botswana and Zambia, but particularly Botswana. We will do early-stage startup investments from all of those
Read MoreWhy bank transfers above ₦10,000 will cost ₦60 under CBN’s new guide
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) says it wants to eliminate fees on transactions below ₦5,000 ($3.68) and reduce charges on mid-tier payments to drop the cost of cashless payments. Under a draft guide to charges by banks and other financial institutions dated April 21, 2026, inter-bank transfers between ₦5,000 ($3.68) and ₦50,000 ($36.81) will now cost ₦10 ($0.007). Fees for transfers above ₦50,000 ($36.81) remain capped at ₦50 ($0.037). The changes mark one of the most significant pricing shifts in Nigeria’s payments space in six years, effectively lowering the cost of sending money for millions of users who rely on small, frequent transactions. By removing fees on small transfers and compressing charges on mid-range transactions, the regulator hopes to incentivise the further adoption of electronic payment options by small businesses. Current Bank Transfer Fees What customers already pay across different transfer tiers. NGN (₦) USD ($) ₦50 ₦25 ₦10 ₦0 Fee: ₦10 ₦10 Below ₦5k Fee: ₦25 ₦25 ₦5k – ₦50k Fee: ₦50 ₦50 Above ₦50k In 2024, e-payments crossed the ₦1 quadrillion ($736.14 billion) mark. According to Moniepoint’s 2025 Informal Economy Report, only one in four informal businesses reported that digital payments accounted for at least 10% of their total revenue in 2025. How the policy affects transfers Today, bank customers already pay transfer fees: The Stamp Duty Shift Who pays the hidden transfer fees? Toggle to see the change. 2025 (Old Rules) 2026 (New Rules) ₦ $ Sender Pays Receiver Pays Transfers of ₦10,000+ Sender Total: ₦60 Receiver Deducted: ₦0 ₦10 ₦50 Bank Fee Stamp Duty Transfers of ₦50,000+ Sender Total: ₦100 Receiver Deducted: ₦0 ₦50 ₦50 Bank Fee Stamp Duty The 2026 Reality The burden has fully shifted. Senders now absorb the bank transfer fee AND the government’s Stamp Duty, making mid-to-high value transactions noticeably more expensive to initiate. Although the new pricing regime seeks to reduce the overall cost of transactions, transfers above ₦10,000 ($7.36) will still be priced at least ₦60 ($0.044). Five years after replacing stamp duty with the Electronic Money Transfer Levy (EMTL), Nigeria reintroduced stamp duties in 2026. Introduced in 2020, EMTL imposed a flat, one-off ₦50 charge on electronic transfers of ₦10,000 ($7.36) and above, paid by the receiver. From 2026, the ₦50 ($0.037) levy is no longer deducted from the receiver but from the sender, increasing transfer costs. The Stamp Duty Shift How total sender costs changed from 2025 to 2026. Hover over any bar to see why. 2025 Total (Sender) 2026 Bank Fee 2026 Stamp Duty Transfers of ₦10,000+ 2025 ₦25 2026 ₦10 + ₦50 Stamp Duty = ₦60 Transfers of ₦50,000+ 2025 ₦50 2026 ₦50 + ₦50 Stamp Duty = ₦100 Interact with the data Hover or tap on the grey (2025) or colored (2026) bars to see exactly how the rules shifted and who is paying for it. PoS fees get structure The new guide also introduces a more structured fee regime for Point of Sale (PoS) withdrawals. On-us withdrawals, using your bank or fintech’s own agent to get cash, will now cost ₦100 ($0.074) per ₦20,000 ($14.72). For not-on-us withdrawals, using another bank or fintech’s own agent to get cash, customers will pay ₦100 ($0.074) per ₦20,000 ($14.72), in addition to a fee determined by the agent. This represents a shift from the current informal pricing structure, where PoS withdrawals can cost as much as ₦100 ($0.074) per ₦5,000 ($3.68). PoS terminals are increasingly becoming the primary means of cash for many. In the first quarter of 2025, PoS terminals moved ₦116.79 billion ($85.97 million) per day. Nigeria 2026 Fee Checker See exactly what leaves your account. Bank Transfer PoS Withdrawal Transaction Amount (₦) ₦ Using my bank’s agent (On-Us) Agent’s extra charge (₦) Principal Amount: ₦15,000 Bank Fee: + ₦10 Stamp Duty Levy: + ₦50 Agent Markup: + ₦0 Total Deducted ₦15,060 At this tier, the ₦50 Stamp Duty (now paid by the sender) makes up the bulk of your transaction cost. For banks and fintechs, the CBN’s new transfer fee policy could reshape revenue expectations. In the first nine months of 2025, eight of Nigeria’s largest banks earned ₦514.82 billion ($378.98 million) from electronic payments. For the government, however, little changes. Stamp duty, like the EMTL before it, remains a small but growing source of revenue, with collections rising to ₦392.78 billion ($289.14 million) in the first 11 months of 2025. For users, sending small amounts is now cheaper, or free, but transfers above ₦10,000 may feel more expensive once the levy is applied, even as PoS withdrawal fees become more predictable. Exchange rate used: ₦1,358.44/$
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👨🏿🚀TechCabal Daily – South Africa fails its AI test
In partnership with Lire en Français اقرأ هذا باللغة العربية Happy salary week. Nigeria’s elections have a retention problem. A new Zikoko Citizen report predicts what participation in the 2027 election might look like, drawing on trends from previous cycles, and explores what could bring about a massive turnaround. Read the full report here. South Africa’s AI policy row Mastercard’s 10-year agreement with Nedbank Kenya establishes gambling monitoring unit Nigeria’s plan to upgrade Internet connection World Wide Web 3 Job Openings Policy Critics are calling out South African regulator for fake citations in its AI policy Solly Malatsi, South Africa’s Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies. Image Source: ITWeb On April 2, South Africa’s Department of Communications and Digital Technologies (DCDT) published a draft version of its AI policy for public comment. South Africa’s proposal decentralises AI oversight by assigning different agencies to monitor its development. The regulator designated AI technologies as “unacceptable,” “high,” “limited,” and “minimal” risk, marking its risk tolerance and what technologies can be comfortably applied to finance and other critical systems that affect the public. Failing its own AI test: Yet, in a somewhat dramatic twist, critics of the proposed AI policy have found at least six of the citations in the draft to be fabricated. According to local publication News24, the policy includes referenced articles that were either never published, could not be linked to existing academic journals, or were simply fabricated by AI hallucinations. It’s a bit of a head-scratcher and an embarrassing situation for a country’s policy against AI risk and ethical use of the technology to be written by AI. Political critics of Solly Malatsi, the country’s Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies, including Khusela Diko, Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Communications, have asked South African regulators to withdraw the policy. Malatsi responded on Saturday, saying he asked the DCDT Director General to “investigate and take action against anyone found to be responsible for any wrongdoing,” suggesting that regulators are now looking inward to find where the lapses occurred. In another post on Sunday, Malatsi confirmed the claims to be true and withdrew the draft policy. “The most plausible explanation is that AI-generated citations were included without proper verification. This should not have happened,” he wrote on X, adding that there will be consequences for those “responsible for drafting and quality assurance.” Zoomout: South Africa’s cabinet will be scrambling over the next few days to save face in what could potentially be a major public embarrassment resulting from a lack of detail. Whether somebody at the DCDT office used AI or not, the draft policy provided a framework to tackle AI risks as the technology gains more prominence in public systems. In Nigeria, the Central Bank is urging banks to use AI in money-laundering systems to combat fraud. South Africa’s policy showed that awareness, where most other countries’ frameworks, including Nigeria and Kenya, focused on centralising AI oversight. The intention is good, but the method of delivery may be less than perfect. Right now, South Africa’s cabinet is scrambling, and it is peak theatre. 20+ Markets. One API. Fincra connects your business to Africa’s payment rails without building market by market. For collection, payout, FX, and settlement through a single integration. See what this means for your business. Companies Mastercard deepens Africa push with Nedbank deal and crypto play Image Source: MyBroadBand Mastercard is tightening its grip on Africa’s payment rails, and it is doing so from both ends: traditional banking and digital currency. The payments giant has signed a 10-year agreement with Nedbank, South Africa’s fourth-largest commercial lender by assets, to migrate the bank’s card portfolio onto its network across South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Eswatini, Lesotho, and Mozambique. The deal will see Nedbank tap into Mastercard’s fraud detection systems and faster transaction processing as it pushes deeper into digital banking. This is a long game. Card networks rarely switch, and when they do, it signals a deeper alignment on technology, pricing, and future products. For Mastercard, locking in a major bank across multiple markets strengthens its position in a region where digital payments are growing, especially in e-commerce. At the same time, it is looking ahead. Mastercard has since announced plans to acquire BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure company, in a $1.8 billion deal, signalling a future in which card payments and crypto wallets are more intertwined. Between the lines: Mastercard is not choosing between fiat and crypto. It wants both. By adding stablecoin capabilities to its network, it is positioning itself as the bridge between traditional banking systems and digital currencies. Why this matters: Payments are becoming a stack rather than a single system. Cards, mobile money, and crypto are increasingly expected to work together, and companies like Mastercard want to sit at the centre of that flow. For banks like Nedbank, the partnership offers a way to modernise without rebuilding from scratch, plugging into global infrastructure while focusing on customers. The Safe and Reliable Banking App With over 35 million users and a 99.9% transaction success rate, PalmPay is making digital banking safer, simpler, and more reliable for everyday Nigerians. Download the app to learn more. Government Kenya sets up unit to tackle rising gambling addiction Image Source: Tenor When it comes to gambling and the risk-reward nature of online betting platforms, Kenyan regulators have noticed a trend: the house is always winning, and too many people are paying the price. The country’s Betting Control and Licencing Board (BCLB), its gaming sector regulator, has set up a dedicated unit to address rising addiction tied to online betting, as concerns grow over how deeply gambling has embedded itself in everyday life. The new unit will focus on consumer protection, awareness, and intervention as cases of problem gambling increase. This is not happening in isolation. Across Africa, regulators are starting to respond to the surge in online betting. South Africa has moved to tighten oversight around advertising and consumer protection, while Nigeria and Ghana have also faced mounting pressure to
Read MoreAirtel Money pushes into merchant payments with Absa Bank Kenya account integration
Airtel Money, Kenya’s second-largest mobile money wallet, has integrated with Absa Bank Kenya to allow small businesses move money between mobile wallets and bank accounts without the manual steps that often delay settlement. Merchants can now receive payments from Airtel Money users into Absa accounts and paybill numbers, a mobile money billing code similar to a merchant payment ID. The integration targets a persistent bottleneck for small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), which often operate across mobile money, bank accounts, and agent networks, slowing transactions and complicating cash management. Direct wallet-to-bank settlement reduces those delays while giving Airtel a clearer route into merchant payments, a segment long dominated by Safaricom’s M-PESA. “This is about unlocking the full potential of digital payments for SMEs across Kenya and ensuring they have the tools to grow with confidence in a rapidly evolving economy,” Absa Bank Kenya Business Banking Director, Renato D’Souza, said in a statement on Monday. Transaction value through mobile money agents totaled KES 633.35 billion ($4.9 billion) in February 2026, according to the Central Bank of Kenya, even as volumes declined with more users shifting to direct wallet and bank transfers. M-PESA continues to anchor the market, processing 21.9 billion transactions worth KES 20.2 trillion ($156 billion) in the six months to September 2025, based on Safaricom disclosures. Airtel’s share has climbed to about 11%, according to Communications Authority data, reflecting steady gains among price-sensitive users and merchants. The Absa integration extends that push by positioning its wallet as a more practical tool for day-to-day business transactions. As more payments originate on telecom networks, lenders are integrating with mobile platforms to stay connected to transaction flows and retain opportunities to offer credit, savings, and working capital products. Banks like NCBA and KCB have already built similar integrations through partnerships with Safaricom. NCBA runs M-Shwari, a savings and loan product linked to M-PESA, while KCB offers KCB M-PESA, which provides short-term credit through the same platform. Equity Bank takes a different approach through Equitel, its mobile virtual network, which links customer accounts directly to mobile money services for payments and transfers. The Airtel–Absa integration extends Airtel’s push into merchant payments, where Safaricom has entrenched bank partnerships such as M-Shwari and KCB M-PESA that combine payments with savings and credit.
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The Next Wave: Kenya will make small loans harder to justify
Cet article est aussi disponible en français <!– In partnership with –> First published 26 April, 2026 Kenya will make small loans harder to justify Central Bank of Kenya Governor Kamau Thugge. IMAGE | NMG Kenya is preparing to change how credit works at the smallest end of the market, and the move is bigger than it looks. A draft Financial Consumer Protection Framework released in March 2026 would require lenders to assess and document a borrower’s ability to repay before issuing a loan. That sounds like standard banking practice. In Kenya’s digital credit market, it cuts into the core logic that made instant loans possible in the first place. For over a decade, digital lenders have operated on a different premise. Instead of verifying income and expenses in the traditional sense, they have relied on behavioural signals, mobile money flows, and repayment history to make decisions in seconds. This allowed them to issue millions of small loans, often under KES 1,000 ($8), to people with no formal financial records. The new framework does not ban that model outright, but it raises the bar for what counts as acceptable evidence in a credit decision. That distinction matters. The question now is not just whether defaults will fall. It is whether the economics of instant micro-lending can still hold under a system that demands proof, documentation and auditability. Will documented affordability work? The appeal of digital lending in Kenya has always been its ability to bypass the constraints of formal finance. Most borrowers operate in the informal sector, where income is irregular and rarely documented. Traditional underwriting struggles in that environment because it depends on stable records such as payslips, tax filings, or bank statements. Digital lenders solved this by redefining what creditworthiness looks like. Instead of asking what you earn, they asked how you behave. How often do you transact on mobile money? Do you repay previous loans on time? Are your spending patterns stable? These proxies are imperfect, but they are fast, cheap, and scalable. The draft rules push the system back toward a more conventional definition of affordability. Lenders must now show that a borrower can repay without falling into financial distress, using reliable information about income, expenses, and existing obligations. In practice, that introduces friction into a model that depends on speed and low marginal cost. This is where the tension sits because behavioural data enabled lending even when documentation was missing. The new framework does not fully reject that data, but it reduces its sufficiency on its own. The cost problem and who absorbs it At small loan sizes, cost discipline is everything. A lender can afford to spend time and resources verifying a KES 100,000 ($775) loan because the expected return justifies it. That logic breaks down for a KES 500 ($4) loan. Digital lenders made these small loans viable by driving the cost of decision-making close to zero. Automated models process large volumes of applications with minimal human intervention. The economics depend on issuing many loans quickly, with losses offset by pricing and repeat borrowing. Introduce a requirement to verify income and expenses, and to change the cost structure. Even partial compliance, such as building systems to cross-check data or flag inconsistencies, adds overhead. In a market where much of the relevant data is not formally recorded, verification becomes harder still. Next Wave continues after this ad. Africa’s Business Heroes is calling Africa’s boldest entrepreneurs, shaping the future today. If you’re building a high-impact business, this is your moment. Apply for a chance to win a share of the $1.5M prize pool, plus mentorship and access to a powerful pan-African network. Applications close April 28. Start your journey now. Apply today! If the cost of assessing a loan approaches or exceeds the expected revenue from that loan, the rational move is to stop issuing it. That does not require every loan to become unprofitable. It only requires enough friction to erode margins at scale. Banks are likely to adapt with relative ease. They already operate under stricter regulatory frameworks and have access to more comprehensive customer data. Their digital lending products tend to target customers with some level of financial history, even if limited. Telecom-linked products occupy a middle ground because they have rich transaction data from mobile money platforms, which could support more robust affordability assessments. Whether that data meets the new standard of “reliability” will depend on how regulators interpret it. However, standalone digital lenders like Tala and Zenka face the most pressure. Their competitive advantage lies in speed, automation, and the ability to serve customers with thin or non-existent credit files. If they are required to document affordability in ways that cannot be fully automated, their cost base rises while their addressable market shrinks. Some consolidation is likely. Smaller players may exit or be acquired. Others may move toward larger loan sizes or specific customer segments where verification is more feasible. This is why I think that some consolidation is likely. Others may move toward larger loan sizes or specific customer segments where verification is more feasible. Some already have. Branch, for instance, has transitioned into a microfinance bank to target higher-value loans within the same customer base while operating under a structure better suited to deeper underwriting. Bateman’s warning, and its limits Milford Bateman, a seasoned economics researcher, has framed Kenya’s situation as a potential replay of the 2010 microcredit crisis in Andhra Pradesh, where aggressive lending and weak oversight led to the sector’s collapse. His argument is that Kenya has allowed a similar pattern to emerge: rapid expansion, high interest rates to cover risk, and a growing base of over-indebted borrowers. Kenya’s digital lending market has expanded quickly, and default rates on small loans are high. The practice of increasing loan limits based on repayment behaviour, rather than a deeper assessment of financial capacity, can mask underlying stress. In that sense, the system has relied on continued access to credit to sustain itself. The Andhra Pradesh crisis was
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Digital Nomads: Amara Uyanna has worked across four continents. She is not done.
It starts in an elevator in Paris, France. On Saturday, April 4, 2026, Amara Uyanna was trying to catch a 10 a.m. flight, mentally checking off her usual work-travel list. Her suitcase in hand, she made her way to the lowest floor of a Parisian hotel where she had lodged; the elevator doors slid open, and she walked in. There, a stranger stepped in, whispering, almost to himself, “Bismillah.” Without thinking, she answered, “Bismillah,” too, their first connection in a foreign land. When they got out of the elevator, they realised they were both headed to the airport. The man was still trying to find a ride. Uyanna, who was in a hurry to catch her flight, offered to share her Uber with him. In the car, they fell into an easy conversation, switching between Arabic and English; the stranger and the Uber driver were surprised that she could speak Arabic. Uyanna recalls this specific camaraderie fondly. It is a snapshot of how she moves through the world: switching languages, sectors, and continents like she switches tabs on a laptop. She works as the Chief of Staff at Schneider Electric, the global energy firm, yet her life and work history read like the itinerary of a perpetual commuter between worlds: oil and gas, global policy, media, fintech, crypto, and energy; Nigeria, the United States, the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia. “The vision is [to be] a global expert,” she told me. But that vision started far from Paris. This is the life of Uyanna, a globe-trotter. Get The Best African Tech Newsletters In Your Inbox Select your country Nigeria Ghana Kenya South Africa Egypt Morocco Tunisia Algeria Libya Sudan Ethiopia Somalia Djibouti Eritrea Uganda Tanzania Rwanda Burundi Democratic Republic of the Congo Republic of the Congo Central African Republic Chad Cameroon Gabon Equatorial Guinea São Tomé and Príncipe Angola Zambia Zimbabwe Botswana Namibia Lesotho Eswatini Mozambique Madagascar Mauritius Seychelles Comoros Cape Verde Guinea-Bissau Senegal The Gambia Guinea Sierra Leone Liberia Côte d’Ivoire Burkina Faso Mali Niger Benin Togo Other Select your gender Male Female Others TC Daily TC Events Next wave Entering Tech Subscribe The scholarship child who wanted to run Chevron Uyanna grew up in Lagos, where she finished primary school before winning a scholarship to Nigerian Turkish International College (NTIC) in Abuja for high school. She went on to Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana, United States, to study Chemical Engineering & French. At a young age, she wanted to be the Managing Director of a global oil company, and for a while, she was on course to achieve that goal. In the summer of 2015, she landed an internship at the Nigerian subsidiary of ExxonMobil, the multinational oil and gas firm. It came with the prestige she had dreamt about as a kid: the exposure, the above-average stipends, and other little privileges she earned from working in a Fortune 500 company. During her internship, she visited the Qua Iboe Terminal, a crude oil export facility in Akwa Ibom State, southern Nigeria. It felt like a dream assignment on paper: a front-row seat to the industry she’d always wanted to lead. But the reality was different. She watched as crude oil spills stained the waterways that the local communities depended on. She watched people cough in the air they were supposed to breathe, and she saw crops die in ways that felt anything but natural. The work she had romanticised, she realised, was not as she had thought. It was rather an occupational hazard for the people living in a resource-rich region that did not feel rich at all. Her quasi-honeymoon ended after that experience. In its place, a single, stubborn question took root: why wasn’t a multinational company held to the same environmental standards in Nigeria as it was abroad? The answers she found were not enough. She went looking for better tools. After her graduation in 2016, Uyanna felt her Chemical Engineering background was no longer enough. To change the rules, she realised, she had to sit in rooms where the rules were written. She enrolled for a master’s in global policy at The Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin, in the US, focusing on development, innovation, and economics. In March 2016, during a summer break, she joined Sustainability International, a nonprofit working to clean up the Niger Delta region. But philanthropy has its own bottleneck: donors were far removed from the affected region, she realised. “I said to my boss [at Sustainability International], ‘let’s make a virtual reality documentary, so that way, we’ll be able to bridge the empathy gap,’” said Uyanna. “And even if people haven’t heard of where we are talking about, once they wear those headsets, we’ll take them there.” Al Jazeera had just launched its Virtual Reality (VR) unit, Contrast VR, in 2017. Uyanna pitched the global media company a VR documentary that would visually pull people into the creeks of the Niger Delta, rather than just read about it. Al Jazeera said yes. By May 2017, she was back in Nigeria with a six-person Al Jazeera crew, searching for a woman whose story would anchor the film. They chose a woman because Uyanna felt that when systems fail, women absorb the shock first and longest, and putting her at the centre would force the viewers to confront the human cost they usually scroll past. “Every time there is some sort of systemic imbalance, women pay the price more,” she said. The film followed Lessi Phillips, who was 16 when an oil pipeline burst in Bodo, a coastal town in Rivers State, southern Nigeria, in 2008, causing a major spill linked to the multinational oil firm Shell. The VR documentary, “Oil in Our Creeks,” highlighted the environmental impact of oil spills on mangrove swamps and the Bodo community’s ten-year fight for justice, cleanup, and recovery. The documentary premiered at film festivals in Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, and Vancouver, raising the funds
Read MoreWhy Nigerian crypto startups are expanding beyond retail trading
Nigerian crypto startups built their businesses on facilitating the buying and selling of digital currencies for retail customers. Now, that may no longer be enough. The country is one of Africa’s largest crypto markets. Yet, at least two operators say competition is compressing margins. Costs do not fall with volume, and the customers driving the most revenue are hard to retain. Peer-to-peer (P2P) trading became a lifeline for Nigerian crypto users after the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) barred banks from servicing crypto transactions in 2021. It forced local startups to find workarounds as global platforms like Paxful, a P2P marketplace that has since shut down, and Binance competed for the same users. Nigerian startups began offering a broader range of products, including P2P and bill payments, around that time. The serious push into stablecoins, B2B payment rails, futures, and more complex financial products accelerated from 2023 onward to diversify income beyond the volatile retail cycle. Recently, that strategy has become more pronounced. Several crypto startups operating in Nigeria, including Busha, Roqqu, Dantown, Luno, and Blockchain.com, have all expanded beyond retail crypto trading. Startups like Yellow Card have shut it down entirely to focus on the B2B side of digital currencies, signalling that the pressure on retail margins is acute enough to force a complete strategic pivot. Get The Best African Tech Newsletters In Your Inbox Select your country Nigeria Ghana Kenya South Africa Egypt Morocco Tunisia Algeria Libya Sudan Ethiopia Somalia Djibouti Eritrea Uganda Tanzania Rwanda Burundi Democratic Republic of the Congo Republic of the Congo Central African Republic Chad Cameroon Gabon Equatorial Guinea São Tomé and Príncipe Angola Zambia Zimbabwe Botswana Namibia Lesotho Eswatini Mozambique Madagascar Mauritius Seychelles Comoros Cape Verde Guinea-Bissau Senegal The Gambia Guinea Sierra Leone Liberia Côte d’Ivoire Burkina Faso Mali Niger Benin Togo Other Select your gender Male Female Others TC Daily TC Events Next wave Entering Tech Subscribe The maths behind a single trade The unit economics of running a crypto retail trading business begin with one trade. On a typical $100 retail transaction, the gross revenue a platform earns ranges from about $0.3 to under $1.40, three crypto startups told TechCabal. One founder, who asked not to be named to speak freely due to the sensitivity of the details being disclosed, breaks this down: a 1% transaction fee earns $1, while foreign exchange (FX) spread on the naira conversion adds roughly $0.35. After deducting direct costs like payment processing and liquidity, gross profit exceeds $1.25. Another operator, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that gross profit after all costs is $0.30 to $0.50, reflecting the startup’s leaner, flat-fee pricing model with zero spread. In normal market conditions, a startup keeps between 0.5% and 1.6% of every transaction, a figure known as the blended take rate. During volatile periods, when spreads widen, that range climbs to between 1.6% and 2.3%, according to the three startups. One startup charges a fixed flat fee regardless of market conditions; others run tiered models from 0.35% to 1% depending on trade size. The cost side is where things get complicated. Running a regulated crypto trading platform means carrying expenses that do not shrink when trading slows: staff, security, compliance, banking and payment partnerships, and the infrastructure needed to move money reliably. These costs are largely fixed regardless of the number of trades a platform processes. When retail trading activity slows, revenue falls, and sometimes becomes disproportionately lower than these fixed expenses, according to the three operators who spoke to TechCabal. “While certain costs scale down with lower activity, a significant portion of the cost base is fixed or semi-fixed,” said Joshua Avoaja, chief technology officer and co-founder of Azza, a Nigerian WhatsApp-based crypto payments startup that said it has processed over $17 million. “Costs don’t compress proportionally during periods of lower trading volume.” A typical active retail customer makes between two and six trades a month—rising to eight during market peaks—and spends between $13 to $15 per trade, according to the range provided by the three operators. Taking the midpoint—about four trades monthly at $14 per trade—and applying the 1% take rate, a crypto startup would earn about $0.56 per customer per month in gross revenue. Set against a customer acquisition cost (CAC) of between ₦8,000 and ₦22,000 (about $5 to $14), recouping that investment on the average user spans between nine months and over two years. For a business solely dependent on retail trading, it needs a deep runway to sustain its operations. “[Crypto retail trading] is a solid but structurally constrained business,” said Avoaja. “Customer acquisition costs are relatively low, gross margins on individual trades are healthy, and demand has proven resilient. But there are limitations. Monetisation is uneven across the user base, with a smaller cohort of highly active users driving a disproportionate share of value.” The business works with sufficient scale, but it has real limits as a standalone product, Avoaja said. Those limits become clearest when you look at who actually moves the revenue needle. High-frequency retail traders called ‘power users,’ make between 20 and 30 transactions monthly and generate a disproportionate share of platform revenue, said Avoaja. These are the customers every crypto startup wants to keep. Yet, they are also the most demanding customers: price-sensitive, quick to move to a competitor offering tighter spreads, and unforgiving of downtime or rate inconsistencies. Retaining them is not a growth problem; it is a reliability problem. Despite the margin compression, Emmanuel Peter, Head of Trading and Markets at Roqqu, a Nigerian crypto exchange, said retail trading remains “a great business” for the startup. Crypto Breakeven Calculator Analyze the unit economics of retail trading Median User Power User Ticket Size ($) Trades / Mo Acquisition Cost (CAC) $10 Time to Breakeven 18 Months Data Source: TechCabal Research (Assumes 1% blended take rate & $1.25 avg gross profit per $100 trade). TechCabal Tools TC Why building beyond retail trading makes economic sense The trading business is cyclical. Volume peaks in December
Read MoreNigeria is tightening tax enforcement. TaxStreem wants to automate compliance.
While working in the tax computation and advisory department at the Nigerian subsidiary of KPMG, the global professional services firm, Kelechi Ibe spent his days helping clients to calculate and structure their taxes. His role was to match the transaction descriptions, which were shared by clients, to the tax law. However, the process for each transaction remained the same. By 2019, a year and a half at KPMG, that pattern had become hard to ignore. The logic was familiar, but the process remained manual, so he tried to automate it using Excel Macros, a tool for automating repetitive tasks. “It didn’t work,” Ibe said, explaining that the task required using an intelligent tool that could read every transaction and determine the appropriate tax to apply. “This would only have been possible if every transaction were hardcoded into the database and had rules associated with each of them. It would have been tough and complicated, with a higher risk of errors,” he said Seven years later, Ibe teamed up with Sam Ayo, a senior intelligence and machine learning engineer, to build TaxStreem, an automated tax compliance platform. Launched in March 2026, TaxStreem uses AI to automate tax computation and compliance by interpreting financial transactions in real time. “AI understands context and nuances, and it gets better with training. A tax technology, as I had always envisaged, could only have been possible with AI,” Ibe said. Get The Best African Tech Newsletters In Your Inbox Select your country Nigeria Ghana Kenya South Africa Egypt Morocco Tunisia Algeria Libya Sudan Ethiopia Somalia Djibouti Eritrea Uganda Tanzania Rwanda Burundi Democratic Republic of the Congo Republic of the Congo Central African Republic Chad Cameroon Gabon Equatorial Guinea São Tomé and Príncipe Angola Zambia Zimbabwe Botswana Namibia Lesotho Eswatini Mozambique Madagascar Mauritius Seychelles Comoros Cape Verde Guinea-Bissau Senegal The Gambia Guinea Sierra Leone Liberia Côte d’Ivoire Burkina Faso Mali Niger Benin Togo Other Select your gender Male Female Others TC Daily TC Events Next wave Entering Tech Subscribe Tax compliance is not optional Under Nigeria’s new tax regime, small businesses are required to use the e-invoicing system from July 2027 to digitally record their transactions for stricter tax compliance. To properly issue tax-compliant invoices, businesses first need to understand the tax implications of every transaction they make, including what attracts value-added tax (VAT), what is exempt, what is zero-rated, what withholding tax applies, and why. That calculation and figuring-out layer is where TaxStreem operates. TaxStreem is designed as an infrastructure layer for tax—a tool that sits directly on top of a business’s financial activity and interprets it in real time. The platform operates four tools that each handle a different task. The first is TaxStreem Numens, an AI-powered tax intelligence and computation engine. The engine, according to Ibe, is trained on Nigerian tax laws and acts as the system’s core calculation tool. He explained that when users connect their business bank accounts from providers such as GTBank, Access Bank, and fintech rails like Kuda, Paystack, and Flutterwave, Numens reads each transaction’s narration, interprets what it represents, assigns the correct tax treatment, and provides an explanation on why it took that particular decision. Although users can still upload reconciliation documents manually to calculate their tax, Ibe noted that pulling transactions directly ensures no transactions are left out. Its second engine, Flux, is an automated filing engine that logs into government portals, particularly the Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS) portal, to submit tax returns and retrieve proof of filing for businesses. TaxStreem Prism, the third engine, focuses on invoicing and accounts, specifically Accounts Payable (AP) and Accounts Receivable (AR), a company’s revenue and expenditures. On the expenditure side, Prism replaces the traditional email-based invoice process with a dedicated vendor portal where vendors can upload their invoices. Ibe noted that Prism analyses the uploaded invoice to check if there are errors in the tax calculation or tax ID, and sends a list of noted errors to both the business and the vendor that uploaded the invoice. On the revenue accounts side, Prism allows businesses to generate invoices directly within the platform. Over a call, Ibe demo-ed how it works: businesses only need to input their product, and the system automatically determines the correct tax treatment. For example, entering ‘diapers’ would automatically be recorded as VAT-exempt, as classified under Nigeria’s tax laws. The invoice is then generated with the correct tax structure already applied. Martina, TaxStreem’s AI chatbot, is the fourth layer. Beyond answering tax questions, it sits atop all transaction data and interprets business performance by offering insights for decision-making. TaxStreem combines its internal AI model, which is trained on Nigerian tax rules, with frontier models like Google’s Gemini to run minor agentic tasks. “What we did is create a custom domain-driven model that is proprietary to us and leverage frontier models to run some mundane tasks for some of the things that would not require user data to protect data privacy within the financial sector,” co-founder Ayo noted. The business of compliance TaxStreem has two revenue streams, targeted at both small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and larger businesses. It charges a ₦25,000 ($18.49) monthly subscription and has an enterprise plan without a labelled pricetag. TaxStreem also sells its Application Programming Interface (APIs) to other platforms, particularly business banking and payments tools. The startup operates in a market with existing expense management solutions for businesses, including FlexFinance, Bujeti, Duplo, and Bumpa, as well as accounting and bookkeeping tools like QuickBooks, FreshBooks, and Xero. However, Ibe noted that he views such tools as partners that could integrate with the platform rather than competitors. For him, TaxStreem’s edge lies in its automated filing on government portals. TaxStreem has raised an undisclosed friends and family round that Ibe estimated to be “tens of thousands of dollars.” “I have not raised institutional funding, and it was very deliberate,” he noted. “I didn’t want to raise until we had launched and had some traction.” He explained that TaxStreem’s next step is to add state-level
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