EBANX, a multinational fintech company, has announced plans to expand its payment gateway solution and operations outside Latin America for the first time, to Africa. Present in 15 countries in Latin America, the 10-year-old unicorn has processed over $1 billion in payments and wants to initially focus on mobile money in Africa.
The CEO and co-founder, João Del Valle, explained that although Africa’s digital economy is still nascent, its exciting potential motivated his company’s decision. Africa’s fast-growing digital economy is only in its early days, and it’s projected to grow up and to the right for the next few decades.
Together with local players, EBANX will be a catalyst to realize the many benefits of a digital economy even faster.

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Uganda has recently come up with its Computer Misuse Bill during plenary, the House considered and passed the Computer Misuse (Amendment) Bill, 2022 with amendments.
The Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa says it’s a blow to online civil liberties.
The bill wants to amend Section 12 of the act and criminalize hacking another person’s electronic device and publishing information obtained from the hack.
The bill also proposes that no person shall write, send or share information that is likely to ridicule, degrade or demean another person, tribe, religion, or gender.
The bill proposes the adoption of penalties of a UGX 15 million fine, imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or both for the listed offenses.

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American multinational computer software Adobe announced that it will acquire the design startup Figma for $20 billion, taking out one of its biggest rivals in the digital design space.
Figma CEO, Dylan Field, says that with Adobe’s amazing innovation and expertise, especially in 3D, video, vector, imaging and fonts, they can further reimagine end-to-end product design in the browser while building new tools and spaces to empower customers to design products faster and more easily.
The $20 billion acquisition price represents a sizable leap for Figma, which was valued at just over $2 billion in 2020 and last valued at $10 billion in June 2021 during the startup’s $200 million in a Series E funding round.

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Kuda MFB, a neobank operating under the Nigerian microfinance bank license, has been recording losses for the past two years.
The company recorded a loss of ₦6,092,554,866, a 602% rise from the ₦868,062,000 ($2,025,295) loss it made in 2020 by the end of the 2021 financial year.
The financial report indicated that the company’s revenue increased by 4,315% from ₦72,649,000 in 2020 to ₦3,207,177,570 in 2021.

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SoftBank-backed Ola plans to eliminate about 200 jobs across its engineering teams over the next few days, on track to shrink its workforce by over 1,200 this year, as the ride-hailing giant streamlines its operations to improve finances.
The company has kickstarted a new wave of layoffs, which affects the engineering teams at its food and ride-hailing businesses.
An Ola spokesperson says the layoff impacts fewer than 200 jobs, accounting for 10% of the company’s engineering team.
Ola says that it currently employs about 2,000 individuals and aims to increase the engineering talent pool to 5,000 over the next 18 months.

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Fintech Portabl announced the closing of a $2.5 million seed round led by Harlem Capital Partners.
Nate Soffio says It is a digital wallet and password manager for financial services and banking apps, but Soffio calls it a financial digital passport, which helps with user identification, making the task less cumbersome for both consumers and financial services.
He says the company’s goal is to wean people from passwords, helping consumers obtain more ownership over their economic data by granting control over who can access it.

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The US and Africa-based blockchain payments startup Bitmama has raised an additional $1.65 million in funding, bringing its total pre-seed round to $2 million.
The new pre-seed round will be used to expand the company’s operational presence, strengthen its team across different markets, consolidate its product offerings, and plot market penetration across Africa. With this expansion, it seeks to rapidly scale new use cases for cryptocurrency within the continent.
Currently present in Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, Bitmama enables its users to trade several cryptocurrencies, use their debit cards for regular online payments, pay utilities and perform transactions such as staking to hedge against currency devaluation.

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Financial literacy across the world is low, as only 33% of adults globally are financially literate.
Standard & Poor’s Global Financial Literacy Survey, in African countries, says the percentage of financially literate adults hovers within the 26% range in Nigeria and the 42% range in South Africa.
NowNow Digital Systems, a Nigerian fintech, has raised a $13 million seed round to improve financial inclusion across Africa by providing financial services to the unbanked and underbanked on the continent
The company says that the funding will help it introduce new products that will further enhance its already existing consumer banking, agency banking, and merchant payment solutions.

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South Africa’s minister of communications and digital technologies Khumbudzo Ntshavheni has published a draft policy document that has proposed the trading of radio frequency spectrum which has been prohibited in the country.
The draft policy document will be used to coordinate national spectrum management approaches to support the rollout of communications networks for socio-economic national development.
The minister has directed the country’s regulators Independent Communications Authority of South Africa and the Competition Commission to develop rules for a secondary market for the spectrum that will ensure that the resultant transactions do not negatively impact competition.

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A series of commitments offered by Amazon in the EU, where regulators are investigating competition concerns linked to its use of third-party data, has been dubbed weak, vague and full of loopholes in a critical submission signed by a dozen civil society and digital rights groups, non-governmental organizations and trade unions.
The bloc’s regulators urged the European Commission to reject Amazon’s commitments outright and in full, and instead continue vigorously to pursue its antitrust cases against Amazon, imposing remedies and penalties as necessary.
Their submission argues that much of what Amazon has proposed to try to settle the EU’s investigation into its handling of merchant data will be required under an incoming pan-EU law anyway that’s expected to start applying from spring 2023, bringing in major penalties for non-compliance.

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