Afridigest Fintech Review: MultiChoice makes a major money move
Week 22 2023: May 28 - June 3
Afridigest is your intelligent guide to Africa’s tech ecosystem. The Fintech Review is a weekly recap of what matters in African fintech.
Hello again, friends! Remember: this Fintech Review goes out on Sundays and the regular Week in Review goes out on Mondays. And expect some additional emails this week as we kick off some experiments. More on that in tomorrow’s newsletter.
On to the week’s highlights:
• It was a quiet week for fintech fundraises with just one debt deal announced across the continent.
• News of the week: MultiChoice announced plans to go deeper into fintech. A new survey shows that African banks perceive the rise of fintech as one of their most significant threats. And South African banks ramped up contingency plans in the event of a full-scale blackout in the country.
• Companies appearing in today’s Fintech Review: Zofi Cash, Fawry, GTP, InTouch, Telda, Yellow Card, Centbee, ValU, & more.
• Executives appearing: Moniepoint’s Tosin Eniolorunda and Ross Strike, Qore/Zone’s Obi Emetarom, Emeka Emetarom, and Wale Onawunmi, Eversend’s Stone Atwine, Yoco’s Katlego Maphai, Vodacom’s Shameel Joosub, Carbon’s Ngozi Dozie, Paystack’s Amandine Lobelle, MNT-Halan’s Mounir Nakhla, Lazerpay’s Njoku Emmanuel, PaySky/Yalla’s Dr. Waleed Sadek, & more.
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Week 22 2023: May 28 - June 3
💸 FundraisesZofi Cash, a Ugandan salary advance & earned wage access platform, raised $1M in debt.
🤝🏽 Mergers & AcquisitionsCloud Invest, a Moroccan provider of digital payment technology, was acquired for an undisclosed amount by Emirati trading tech firm Equiti Group.
📰 News of the WeekThere’s a new giant coming to African fintech.
JSE-listed South African video entertainment platform Multichoice, one of Africa's top fifty companies by market cap, announced plans to launch a payment platform called Moment this week.
It won’t go at it alone, however.
The Moment platform will come to market in a joint venture with Israeli fintech-as-a-service unicorn Rapyd and US VC firm General Catalyst (an investor in Rapyd, American fintech unicorn Stripe, Mexican fintech unicorn Stori, European fintech unicorn Monzo, and others).
The long-term plan for Moment is to provide infrastructure enabling pan-African payments for the ~44M SMEs operating on the continent and to also offer virtual accounts & other solutions in over 40 currencies to facilitate global-Africa trade for importers and exporters.
It’s a move that sees MultiChoice make good on its FY23 strategic commitment to expand beyond video entertainment.
And it furthers the entertainment company’s business model diversification into the fintech sector alongside its existing NMS Insurance subsidiary, which provides insurance coverage on DStv satellite decoders.
In a strategy that replicates the NMS Insurance playbook (where MultiChoice expanded into fintech by focusing on insurtech opportunities immediately adjacent to its core business), Moment is poised to focus first on consolidating the ~$3.5B in payments that MultiChoice already processes annually.
Additional reading:
🚀 Partnerships
GTP, the leading prepaid card processor across Africa and an MFS Africa subsidiary, announced a partnership with Senegalese/French digital payments aggregator InTouch. As a result, InTouch customers across 13 African markets will be able to engage in cross-border transactions with Visa card credentials.