Browsing: african technology

An e-coin. E-money has been offering payment avenues to customers who have no access to banks. www.theexchange.africa

The question is, what if one day you went to pay for expenses with your card or mobile app and it returned an error message? Or was your service provider that issues your money declared bankrupt? Scary, right?
Recently, customers have been converting their regular traditional money into e-money. Service providers have enabled the transfer of electronic money to banks, from person to person, and for making payments.
For regulators and supervisors that control the protection of consumers’ e-money and digital currencies, coming up with legal bindings and restrictions in the fast-changing sector has become very challenging. These regulators and supervisors must devise ways to protect customers from a possible system failure and ultimately prevent them from losing their funds.…

www.theexchange.africa
  • Google’s investment will include the landing of the subsea cable Equiano which will enable faster internet speeds and lower connectivity costs
  • It also includes low-interest loans to help small businesses and equity investments in African startups
  • Google is building global infrastructure to help bring faster internet to more people and lower connectivity costs

Google has announced a plan to invest $1billion over 5 years to support Africa’s digital transformation.

According to the company, the investment focuses on enabling fast, affordable internet access for more Africans; building helpful products; supporting entrepreneurship and small business, and helping nonprofits to improve lives across Africa.

The announcement was made at Google’s first-ever Google for Africa event, held virtually and live-streamed.

Affordable Internet

The planned $1billion investment announced today by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, will include enabling affordable internet access and building helpful products.

Pichai said Google is building global infrastructure to …

african tech

I ended my May 2021 essay with the hypothesis “…leading fintechs might turn around and start acquiring the banks” and, sure enough, on the 12th of May 2021, the Competition Authority of Kenya in a gazette notice approved the acquisition of 84.89% stake in Century Microfinance Bank by Branch International Limited – a leading global fintech with operations in Kenya[1]. One of the signs of a maturing ecosystem is home grown ventures mature into unicorns[2], gazelles and zebras[3], increased mergers and acquisitions[4] and the entry of global tech giants hungry for a piece of the action – the subject of this essay. So, whilst the Branch acquisition was unexpected, it was unsurprising when Twitter announced on 14th April 2021 that they are setting up their Africa HQ in Ghana[5]. On the very same day Amazon announced an investment of …