| Zambia | Chipper Cash acquires Zoona. African payments company, Chipper Cash, has acquired Zambian fintech, Zoona, for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition is still subject to regulatory approvals, but will facilitate Chipper Cash’s entry into Zambia alongside access to Zoona’s existing base of agents and customers. TechCabal |
| | EDITOR'S NOTE | This is an exciting acquisition given that Zoona’s core proposition is essentially a switch between other wallets. When building out a regional payments business, there are competitive benefits to quickly activating a new node and connecting that new node to the rest of the network. For Chipper Cash, Zoona’s acquisition reduces the time it takes to get started in Zambia, by owning existing payment and agent infrastructure. It also potentially provides a marketing layer of physical agents to sell and onboard the Chipper Cash product. |
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| Africa | MFS Africa partners with Ripple for cross-border payments. The pan-African payments platform which connects mobile money wallets and bank accounts across the continent will leverage Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) solution to move money across borders. Ripple |
| | EDITOR'S NOTE | About $42 billion worth of cross-border payments was processed in Sub-Saharan Africa but the cost of remittance remained about 6% - double the SDG target of 3%. Given the recent bearish sentiment around crypto, it’s encouraging to see partnerships that explore a real-world use case like cross-border payments. |
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| Africa | FTX’s Impact on African consumers. In this NY Mag piece by Reeves Wiedeman, he details FTX’s aggressive marketing strategies to onboard and collect deposits from West African customers. NY Mag |
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| Kenya | The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) instructs lenders to forgive half of digital loans. Kenya’s central bank and apex financial regulator has directed all licensed lending institutions to forego half of the outstanding loans obtained via mobile phones. The other half of the loans will have to be repaid by the borrowers before May 31, 2023. The goal of this directive is to change the status of loans from non-performing to performing and improve the credit standing of the debtors with the credit bureaus. The East African |
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| South Africa | Adumo raises R190 million in new funding. The new round includes equity funding from Apis Partners, Crossfin Holdings, IFC’s Fintech division, and a debt facility from Investec Bank. Adumo will allocate the new funding towards subsidiaries - GAAP, SwitchPay, and Humble. Fintech Finance |
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