Stories that begin with something visible and ask what larger system is quietly being revealed.
A decade of celebrated offshore raises taught African lenders a brutal lesson in currency gravity: borrow in dollars, lend in shillings, and one devaluation erases five years of growth. The fix is structural: local-currency funding. The discipline extends to acquisitions.
Investor Corner · 10 Nov 2026 · 4 min read
The zero-rate decade taught African consumer fintech to buy growth with free hardware and referral bonuses. The arbitrage syndicates said thank you. The survivors of the funding winter now sell infrastructure to businesses instead of subsidies to tourists.
Investor Corner · 10 Nov 2026 · 4 min read
The funding winter pushed fintechs toward a tempting shortcut: buy a struggling microfinance bank, inherit the deposit licence, skip the queue. But a licence purchase is a balance-sheet purchase, and Kenya's microfinance sector is a public ledger of how expensive that parchment can be.
Investor Corner · 10 Nov 2026 · 5 min read