Hi Fintech friends 👋, the reason you are receiving this newsletter late today is because I’m always publishing from Tanzania, where since last weekend, there has been a serious internet outage that made it hard to prepare and publish the newsletter. Better late than never, below are the highlights of what happened in African Fintech last week;

• Three Fintech deals worth over $90 Million were announced including one acquisition.
• Owner of Africa’s biggest mobile money increased net profit to $480 Million.
• African Fintech Unicorn resumed US operations two months after pausing.
• Nigerian officials asked for a $150 Million bribe from the World's largest Crypto exchange.
• The CEOs of three Nigeria’s biggest digital banks sat down to discuss the banking and fintech landscape in Africa.

💸Fundraise and Exits

• South African Fintech Company Adumo Acquired By Lesaka In a $85.9 Million deal.Adumo provides card-acquiring POS devices, integrated payments and reconciliations services to merchants and consumers.
• Seamfix, a company that provides transaction accreditation and digital identities and verification for large organizations and governments in Africa raised $4.5 Million to expand outside Africa.
• Egyptian Swypex secured $4 Million seed round to expand its corporate card platform.

💰 Venture Funds

• Understanding the investment landscape for African startups.

🚀 Partnerships & Product Launches

• Chipper Cash resumed US operations two months after pausing services.
• eTranzact Global Limited, a payment technology solutions provider based in Nigeria expanded to Uganda after receiving an operational license from the Central Bank of Uganda.
• MoneyHash partnered with Visa to Empower Secure and Enhance Digital Payment Experiences.

👔 Leadership Lineup

• Nigerian officials allegedly asked for a $150 million bribe before arresting Binance staff. 

One month before Tigran Gambrayan, a compliance officer for the global cryptocurrency exchange Binance, was arrested in February, he was asked by Nigerian officials to pay $150 million in crypto, according to a report from the New York Times. The report suggested that the money was a bribe.

📰 News of the Week

Safaricom increased its net profits to $480.84 Million.

Kenya’s Safaricom, East Africa’s most profitable company, has posted a 1.2% increase in net profits to $480.84 million (KES62.99 billion) in the full year ending March 2024, driven by strong mobile money service and internet growth.

Revenues from M-Pesa grew 20% year-on-year, reaching $1 billion (KES140 billion) from $891.3 million (KES117.2 billion) in 2023 while mobile data revenues rose 18% to $1.4 billion (KES189.8 billion). Voice revenue declined 0.6 % to $608.4 million (KES80.5 billion).

M-Pesa’s growing profitability was driven by strong performance in B2B (39.8%) and P2P (15.4%) payments and rising uptake of the firm’s global payments platform which rose 20% year-on-year.

The firm’s operating profit increased 20% to $1 billion (Sh140 billion), becoming the first East African listed firm to cross the billion-dollar.

👀 Eye Openers

• Why Banks love mobile money partnerships?  There have been a number of banks and mobile money partnerships in Africa, and most of them focus on lending. Do you know why banks love mobile money partnerships?

Large Customer base

For context, as of 2023, 72% of the 60 million Tanzanians use mobile money services, up from 60% in 2017, while 22% of the population uses commercial banks. Banks partner with mobile money to leverage the mobile money pool of customers to offer their financial services.

Low Customer Acquisition Cost(CAC)  and Know Your Customer(KYC) sharing

When partnering with mobile money, banks use existing ‘know-your-customer’ (KYC) details that mobile money collects during customer registration of the SIM card and mobile money account. This helps banks spend fewer resources on acquiring customers and boosts the onboarding process for these customers

Better Credit Scoring and Debts repayments

Mobile money is using more of its data endpoints from how people are transacting (sending money, receiving money, paying bills, airtime usage, and more) to develop a credit score that can be used by them and their bank partners to score customers who want to receive loans. Another very important aspect of lending, after credit scoring, is repayments, and mobile money has become better at that by building direct debit features that allow lenders to collect their repayments even faster at the right times. 

Large customer base + better credit score engine + better repayments = a good lending business. 

📑 Read of the week

• Is Africa’s Dollar Shortage ending anytime soon?(Medium)
• African Startups are missing big time from legacy businesses and systems¦(Medium)

📖 Other News, Reads, and Media

• Airtel mobile money announced plans to IPO in 2025.“We will list next year. We will continue to bring additional countries into the envelope. We are still a year from that IPO,” said CEO Olusegun Ogunsanya.
• A former chief risk officer of the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) sued the switching company for unlawfully terminating his appointment months after he raised concerns about financial impropriety.
• After two fundraises in 2023, Alerzo cut its workforce in February due to “digitization.
• Nigeria raised levy on e-transfers by 900%, analysts call for a transaction cap.
• SEC chief invoked patriotism, asking traders to stop P2P trading as fears of a ban linger.
• Nigeria mandated 1.9 million PoS agents to register with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) to combat fraud.

🎥 VIDEO INTERVIEWS/DISCUSSIONS

Nigerian Neobank Roundtable: In this episode, The Flip hosted conversation with the CEOs of three of Nigeria's biggest digital banks: Moniepoint's Tosin Eniolorunda, Kuda's Babs Ogundeyi, and FairMoney's Laurin Hainy.

🦉 Tweet of the Week

🎯 Fintech Opportunities

• Flutterwave is hiring for VP, Enterprise Risk Management.
• FairMoney is hiring for Lead Product Manager 

Made in Tanzania 🇹🇿 with 💚

👍🏽👎🏽  Did you enjoy this edition of This Week In Fintech Africa? Please share your feedback with me on Twitter or LinkedIn .