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Moniepoint is phasing out its remittance product

Courier platforms must submit data in Kenya

MTN targets 30 million fintech users in Nigeria

Nigeria is getting two new satellites

World Wide Web 3

Opportunities

Fintech

Nigerian fintech unicorn Moniepoint is shutting down its remittance app

Less than 18 months after launching MonieWorld, Moniepoint, the Nigerian fintech company, is shutting down its United Kingdom remittance business. MonieWorld was its first major attempt to build outside its African markets, and Moniepoint spent millions of dollars building the infrastructure needed for that expansion.

To put it simply, Moniepoint launched MonieWorld in April 2025 to let people in the UK send money to Nigerian bank accounts directly from a MonieWorld account, a British bank account, cards, Apple Pay, or Google Pay. At launch, Moniepoint emphasized how quickly the service could move money and highlighted competitive exchange rates, placing it in direct competition with remittance startups such as Grey and LemFi.

And yes, the company did spend heavily. Moniepoint incorporated its UK subsidiary, Moniepoint GB, in February 2024. By December that year, it had spent $1.26 million on administrative and infrastructure costs. It also invested $2.51 million to acquire Bancom Europe, a UK Financial Conduct Authority-authorised electronic money institution (EMI). Regulatory filings show Moniepoint had set aside $7.39 million for its UK expansion. That investment was meant to build the regulatory and technical machinery for a much larger diaspora business, not just a single remittance app.

Moniepoint says monthly transaction volume among its UK users grew 70%, and the UK-Nigeria remittance corridor was worth £2.76 billion ($3.69 billion) in 2021. The company has not disclosed how much MonieWorld processed or how much revenue it generated. Moniepoint is not saying the product failed. Instead, it says a review of its portfolio and long-term priorities showed that its resources would be better deployed in its core African markets.

The move also fits a broader pattern for fintechs that expand abroad, then reassess where their strongest operational edge actually sits. In Moniepoint’s case, that edge appears to be in the African markets where it already has scale and active product development. In 2025, Moniepoint processed $294 billion in annualised transactions in Nigeria. In March 2026, it advanced its data operations ambitions by acquiring Orda, a restaurant-management company that operated in Kenya and Nigeria. In Kenya, it acquired 78% of Sumac Microfinance Bank and appointed former Branch Kenya CEO Rose Muturi to lead the business. Moniepoint appears to be signaling a larger, deeper African payments strategy rather than spending more millions on convincing the UK market to adopt another remittance app, where it likely has a weaker moat.

Still, questions remain: what will happen to MonieWorld’s technology and intellectual property (IP), and how will Bancom operate going forward — folded into Moniepoint’s existing operations or maintained as a standalone business?

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Logistics & Transport

Kenya wants parcel delivery operators to record and submit delivery details

Riders working on ride-hailing and courier service apps such as Uber, Bolt, and Glovo in Kenya are about to become something more than delivery drivers. From September 20, they could also become part of the country’s surveillance and tax enforcement system.

Kenya’s Communications Authority (CA), the country’s communications regulator, has introduced new rules requiring app-based courier platforms to verify and record parcel contents, as well as sender and recipient details. The records must be made available to the regulator, the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA), and the police upon request.

The immediate goal is straightforward: stop drugs, firearms, and other prohibited goods from moving through the fast-growing on-demand delivery economy. But the change goes further than that.

Kenya is not starting parcel oversight from scratch. Postal and courier operators have long been required to record what they carry and who is sending it. The bigger shift is that Kenya has created a new “Courier Hailing Service Provider” category, complete with licensing fees, real-time parcel tracking, identity verification, and compensation rules for lost or damaged goods. Platform operators such as Uber and Bolt must pay KES 5,000 ($38.63) for the licence application and KES 100,000 ($772.56) in initial fees to obtain a 10-year licence.

For years, ride-hailing and delivery apps treated parcel delivery as a natural extension of moving people around cities. Now Kenya is formally bringing that business under a regulated courier category.

The rules also give regulators a new view into a part of the informal economy that has largely operated inside apps. Online traders increasingly use riders to move goods to customers, and those transactions could now leave a much clearer regulatory trail.

Zooming out, Africa’s super apps continue to expand into logistics because moving parcels is becoming nearly as important as moving people. Kenya is now asking a different question: when a ride-hailing app becomes a courier company, what exactly should the government be allowed to see?

The answer, at least in Kenya, is increasingly quite a lot.

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Fintech

MTN wants 30 million Nigerians to use its fintech services

MTN already has Nigeria’s phone users. Now it wants more of them to use its financial services too. Africa’s largest telecoms company is targeting as many as 30 million fintech customers in Nigeria over the medium term, up from about five million today.

Ralph Mupita, MTN Group chief executive officer, said the company sees a path to converting 30% — and potentially 50% — of its Nigerian telecoms customers into fintech users. To do that, MTN is bringing in technology from Alibaba, Alipay, and Ant International, while preparing to expand beyond payments into lending.

MTN’s fintech business began with mobile money and payments, often through partnerships with banks. The company is now trying to sell more services, including payments, lending, remittances, and insurance, to the people already using its mobile network. In Nigeria, that means competing in a market where OPay, PalmPay, MoneyPoint, and other digital fintechs are already fighting for customers.

Five million customers becoming 30 million would mean adding roughly 25 million people to MTN’s Nigerian fintech base — six times its current size. Across Africa, MTN’s MoMo monthly active users rose 12.1% to 70.8 million in the six months ended June 2026, while fintech transaction value reached $330.5 billion in constant currency.

Nigeria is only one part of that business, but it is an important test of whether MTN can turn its large telecom distribution network into a financial services advantage. The next stage is riskier. MTN currently works with partner banks that use customer data to assess borrowers, but Mupita said the group increasingly intends to lend from its own balance sheet. That could give MTN more control, but also more credit risk. The company says it will move gradually.

MTN is not trying to build another standalone fintech app and hope users download it. It is using its existing network, customer relationships, and merchant base to push financial services deeper into everyday life. In effect, it is asking mobile users in Nigeria to adopt a new habit: do not just see us as a call and data provider; use us to move money too. That ambition is already visible in how it has built and scaled its myMTN NG app.

MTN is also not operating in a vacuum. Airtel Nigeria’s mobile money revenue and users grew to $9 million and 2.7 million, respectively, in the year ended March 2026, with both metrics rising by at least 59%. MTN believes it can do better.

Emerging Tech

Nigeria is getting two new satellites

Nigeria is adding two more satellites to its digital toolbox. The government has approved the acquisition and deployment of NIGCOMSAT-2A and NIGCOMSAT-2B, which are expected to improve Internet access and reduce the country’s reliance on foreign satellite capacity.

Nigeria’s Federal Executive Council (FEC) approved the project, and the country’s satellite agency, NIGCOMSAT, says the satellites are expected to launch between 2027 and 2028. According to NIGCOMSAT, the satellites will be built by Thales Alenia Space and Israel Aerospace Industries. They are high-throughput satellites, which means they can carry more Internet traffic than older systems.

Nigeria has been trying to use satellites to reach areas that fibre and mobile towers cannot easily serve. NIGCOMSAT is already working with the government on Project 774, which aims to connect all 774 local government council secretariats. The new satellites are the next step in that effort: more capacity in orbit should give the agency more room to serve rural communities, businesses, and government offices.

This is about more than faster Internet. Nigeria currently depends partly on foreign satellite infrastructure; adding domestic capacity gives it more control over an important part of its communications system. It also gives NIGCOMSAT more capacity to sell broadband services and support public institutions, provided the agency can turn the approval into a working, commercially useful service.

Nigeria still has to build and launch the satellites, secure the right orbital slots, and connect people to the service on the ground. But the direction is clear: the country is putting more of its connectivity infrastructure in its own hands, one satellite at a time.

CRYPTO TRACKER

The World Wide Web3

Source:

Coin Name

Current Value

Day

Month

– 1.09%

• 29.30%

– 1.24%

• 26.59%

• 52.24%

• 93.88%

– 4.73%

• 27.25%

• Data as of 02.10 AM WAT, August 26, 2026.

Opportunities

Creative Economy Accelerator Programme. The programme is open to African startups building in music, film and media, design, and creative tech. Selected startups will receive between $20,000 and $50,000 in funding and support. Apply here by August 28.

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Written by: Yemi Kareem, Emmanuel Nwosu, and Zia Yusuf

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu & Ganiu Oloruntade

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