M&A

Zedcrest acquires Nigerian fintech Leatherback

Five years after backing cross-border payments startup Leatherback, Nigerian financial services group Zedcrest has decided it no longer wants to be only an investor. It now owns the company.

On Monday, Zedcrest acquired Leatherback for an undisclosed amount. The company said it plans to revive Leatherback’s cross-border payments ambitions, describing the opportunity as “significantly underpenetrated.” Leatherback will continue to operate independently under its own brand, team, and product suite, keeping it distinct from Zedcrest’s deeper focus on traditional finance and wealth management.

Why did Zedcrest acquire Leatherback? Some investors wait for exits, while others actively engineer them. As with OmniRetail and Traction Apps in 2024, investors saw an opportunity to bring payments infrastructure, licences, merchant relationships, and distribution under one roof rather than waiting for another buyer. In Leatherback’s case, Zedcrest appears to have reached a similar conclusion: the fintech was becoming more valuable as part of its broader financial services ecosystem than as a standalone portfolio company. The acquisition gives Zedcrest infrastructure it did not previously fully own: the ability to collect, hold, convert, and move money across borders.

The move fits Zedcrest’s current business structure. The group lends money through Zedvance Finance, manages investments, and advises businesses on raising capital. It now also owns the technology that lets those businesses collect, hold, convert, and send money across borders. That gives Zedcrest greater control over the customer experience and another revenue stream each time money moves.

For those unfamiliar, the relationship between the two companies has been years in the making, though not without turbulence. When Leatherback raised $10 million in a pre-seed round in 2021, Zedcrest led the round. At the time, Leatherback was a cross-border fintech. After several years marked by operational setbacks and a leadership reshuffle, the company has shifted toward a fintech infrastructure play for businesses across several markets. Some of those businesses may already sit within Zedcrest’s orbit, giving the group an opportunity to cross-sell Leatherback’s services and build a distribution moat.

Leatherback also stands to benefit from the acquisition. Expanding into new countries requires regulatory compliance, new licences, new banking partners, and compliance hiring. That is costly. Backing from a larger financial institution means Leatherback can spend less time worrying about funding and more time focusing on the business.

Fintech

Kenyan court tells unlicenced lenders: no licence, no lawsuit

There was a time when Kenyan digital lenders operated with little oversight. In that era, any “operator” could raise a few shillings, set up a loan-sharking business, lend at predatory rates, and harass borrowers in an attempt to recover debts.

That period has gradually ended. In 2022, digital lending licences became mandatory, and the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) had approved 252 firms to operate in the sector as of July 2026. Kenya has now issued another warning to unlicenced lenders.

A Kenyan court has ruled that unlicenced digital lenders cannot sue debtors for failing to repay their loans — in other words, no licence, no help getting your money back.

Before 2022, digital lenders operated in a regulatory grey area. That changed after years of complaints about excessive interest rates, abusive debt collection tactics, and misuse of borrowers’ personal data. In 2021, Kenyan Parliament amended the law to give the CBK authority over digital lenders. Since licencing began in 2022, the CBK has published updated lists of licenced digital credit providers and gained the power to suspend or revoke licences and inspect lenders that fail to comply with its rules.

This month, two lenders, Tri-State Capital and Mombo iCapital, took borrowers to court over unpaid loans. Under normal circumstances, debt recovery is straightforward: if a borrower does not repay, the lender goes to court. In these cases, however, the lenders could not prove they had been licenced by the CBK, and the court dismissed both suits before considering whether the borrowers actually owed the money.

Kenya’s digital lending market has more than 800 operators, and many still operate outside the licencing framework. The ruling shifts the balance of power by signalling that courts may not help unlicenced lenders recover unpaid loans. It does not erase the debt or make loans free. It simply means lenders operating outside the law may have very limited legal options to enforce repayment.

The concern is that, without adequate protection measures, unethical debt collection practices could resurface.

Emerging Tech

Africa wants AI that speaks its languages

African communications ministers and industry leaders have adopted the Abuja Ministerial Declaration on Meaningful Connectivity and launched ATLAS Umoja AI, a pan-African initiative to build artificial intelligence systems that work in African languages.

The declaration was adopted at the African Telecommunications Union (ATU) conference in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, on July 24. The initiative brings together Nigeria, Kenya, Togo, Namibia, and Benin, alongside the GSMA, Awarri, Zindi, Pawa AI, and Mozisha. It builds on Nigeria’s N-ATLAS project, an open-source large language model launched at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2025.

ATLAS Umoja AI, named after the Swahili word for “unity,” is intended to pool regional datasets and research to develop AI that understands and operates in African languages. Africa has more than 2,000 languages, representing over 30% of the world’s total, yet fewer than 2% receive meaningful support from current AI models.

Most global AI tools, including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, are trained primarily on English and other high-resource languages. For speakers of Yoruba, Wolof, or Amharic, the experience is often limited. ATLAS Umoja aims to change that by creating datasets, models, and tools built specifically for African languages. The goal is for AI to work in the languages people actually speak, not only those that dominate the internet.

This is not the first effort of its kind. In October 2025, six of Africa’s largest mobile operators — Airtel, Axian Telecom, Ethio Telecom, MTN, Orange, and Vodacom — launched a separate GSMA-backed initiative to build African-language AI models. At Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona 2026, developers demonstrated the first open Swahili reasoning model. ATLAS Umoja adds government backing and funding to what had previously been an industry-led effort.

The race to build AI for African languages is also a race to shape how billions of people will interact with technology. If African governments and companies do not build these models, foreign tech giants may do so on their own terms, using their own data.

Fintech

Vodacom’s mobile money business hit $548 billion

Vodacom, the telecom group that operates in eight African markets and serves more than 237 million customers, processed nearly $548 billion in mobile money transactions over the past year, underscoring how much of its future now sits beyond phone calls and data bundles.

In a trading update for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, the company said its mobile money platforms — including Safaricom’s M-PESA, which it now controls after raising its stake to 55% — processed $547.9 billion in the 12 months to June 30. Financial services now account for more than 22% of group service revenue, up from 13% before the Safaricom transaction.

In June, Vodacom bought an additional 20% stake in Safaricom, lifting its ownership to 55% and giving it controlling control of East Africa’s largest telecom operator. The transaction gave Vodacom a larger share of Safaricom’s businesses, including M-PESA, which is used by more than 40 million Kenyans.

Vodacom began as a South African mobile operator focused on airtime and data. Over the past decade, it has built M-PESA — originally a Safaricom product — into a financial services platform spanning Kenya, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Mozambique, Lesotho, and Egypt. M-PESA allows users to send money, pay bills, save, borrow, and now make contactless payments, all from a mobile wallet.

The company is also revising its long-term targets. It has raised its Vision 2030 revenue ambition from more than R200 billion ($12 billion) to more than R300 billion ($18 billion), and increased its financial services customer target from 120 million to 130 million. The higher targets reflect confidence that financial services, rather than traditional telecom, will drive future growth. South Africa remains its largest market, but growth is coming from Egypt, where financial services revenue rose 73%, and from its international businesses, which grew 14% in service revenue.

Vodacom is increasingly a financial services company that still runs mobile networks. The remaining question is whether regulators across Africa, which oversee telecom and banking under different rules, are prepared for a company that operates in both sectors.