What does it take to build a digital bank that truly solves the problems of small businesses in Africa? In this episode, Samora Kariuki sits down with Rinse Jacobs, CEO of Zazu, a neobank moving beyond the account and card to build the foundational financial hub for Africa's entrepreneurs.

Topics covered include:

●  Why traditional banking consistently fails the modern SME;

●   The "rebundling"strategy vs. the single-product fintech wedge;

●  Combining incorporation, banking, and bookkeeping into one seamless workflow;

●  Why transparent subscriptions build more trust than complex hidden fees;

●  Using AI to create a"CFO-in-your-pocket" for founders;

●  The blueprint for a Pan-African business banking network;

For fintech builders, investors, and entrepreneurs seeking to understand the future of SME banking, this episode offers a clear playbook on building a platform that goes beyond the basics.

What does it take to build an enterprise-grade cross-border payments platform across Africa? In this episode, Samora Kariuki sits down with Ola Oyetayo, CEO of Verto—a licensed B2B payments platform moving billions monthly with corridor-level precision.

Topics covered include:

• FX liquidity gaps and price discovery across African markets
  

• Why compliance is a growth enabler, not a bottleneck
  

• The operational discipline required to build trust in high-risk corridors
  

• Where stablecoins fit in (and where they don’t)
  

• The future of local currency convertibility and overlooked markets like the DRC
  

For fintech builders, investors, and policymakers seeking clarity on what real infrastructure looks like beyond the hype, this episode offers a rare, licensed view from the inside.

What happens when one of Africa’s top engineers sets out to rebuild a fintech and mobility platform—this time using AI?

In this episode of the F-Squared Podcast, Samora Kariuki sits down with Kamal Budhabhatti, CEO of Little, to unpack how he’s applying LLMs, voice commands, and platform-first thinking to transform the next phase of African digital infrastructure. This is a deep dive into technical decisions, architectural trade-offs, and why Kamal believes voice—not buttons—is the future interface for fintech and mobility.

🎙 Guest Kamal Budhabhatti, CEO @ Little Builder of systems used by banks, telcos, and now millions of users across Africa.

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M-Shwari scaled to 15 million users in 41 days. Fuliza became a verb. Now, Eric Muriuki is building Loop DFS into the Stripe of Africa.

In this episode of F-Squared, Samora Kariuki goes deep with one of Africa’s most experienced digital finance leaders. They unpack:

• The legal architecture behind M-Pesa’s rise
  

• What went wrong—and right—with M-Shwari’s launch
  

• How Fuliza went from pitch to cultural phenomenon
  

• Loop’s pivot from neobank to fintech infrastructure play
  

• Why AI-first hiring might be the future
  

• The case for fintech as Kenya’s next big export industry
  

No fluff. Just timeless lessons from the person who’s built the most successful digital finance products in Africa.

 In this episode, I sit down with Obi Emeratom, the founder and CEO of Zone, to explore how his company is rebuilding the core infrastructure of African payments using a regulated, blockchain-based architecture.

We unpack:

• The journey from Appzone to Zone and why the spin-off was necessary
  

• How Zone won over Nigerian banks without evangelizing crypto
  

• What makes regulated blockchains credible to central banks
  

• Why decentralization with permissioning may be the right model for Africa
  

• The real-world bottlenecks of legacy switches and how Zone bypasses them
  

• Zone Pay, deep linking, merchant wallets, and the next wave of use cases
  

• Why Obi believes the future of payments is regulated DeFi built from the ground up
  

  This is not a theoretical chat t’s a grounded look at the friction in today’s systems and a pragmatic blueprint for what comes next.

🎧 Listen in if you care about the evolution of African fintech infrastructure, cross-border payments, and compliance-aligned innovation.

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What if moving money across borders was as seamless as sending an email?

In this episode of the F-Squared Podcast, host Samora sits down with Eytan Messika (Nilos) and Nicolai Eddy (Nala & Rafiki) to unpack stablecoins in the African context—from FX innovation and liquidity provisioning to the regulatory frictions shaping adoption.

🔍 What’s inside:

Why correspondent banking is outdated for frontier markets

How stablecoins create real-time liquidity (and where the frictions still lie)

Insights on remittance, treasury, imports, and P2P arbitrage

What it takes to build trust with regulators—and why that’s the long-term moat

📊 A grounded, builder-first take on stablecoins. Real use cases. Real frictions. Real potential.

🎙 Guests:

Eytan Messika, Co-founder @ Nilos

Nicolai Eddy, COO & Co-founder @ Nala & Rafiki

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#Stablecoins #FintechAfrica #Remittances #FX #USDC #CrossBorderPayments #DigitalCurrency #FSquaredPodc

South Africa’s payments scene looks “solved” from the outside—until you try to wire money 50 times a day from your phone. In this candid conversation, Kiaan Pillay, CEO & co-founder of Stitch, sits down with Samora Kariuki to unpack how a scrappy side-project became the enterprise payments partner for Binance, Vodacom, Foschini Group, and more.

You’ll hear:

The origin story: screen-scraping bank portals to automate payouts and stumbling onto Africa’s “Plaid moment.”

Why enterprises cared—and the overlooked gaps in settlement, reconciliation, and fraud data that incumbents ignored.

Pivot lessons: off-boarding SMEs, doubling down on high-touch service, and hiring engineers as 24/7 support.

Capitec Pay, PayShap & mobile money—what’s really driving South Africa’s rapid shift to pay-by-bank rails.

The Binance baptism: how one high-risk client forced Stitch to mature overnight.

Enterprise sales realities: slow, lumpy, but worth the step-change in volume.

Advice for founders: make people say no, protect culture, and learn to be impatient and patient at once.

In this engaging episode of the Frontier Fintech podcast, host Samora Kariuki sits down with Ngozi Dozie, co-founder of Carbon, to unpack the untapped potential of Nigeria’s lending market. Despite Nigeria’s status as one of Africa’s largest economies, only 2–5% of its population accessed loans annually a decade ago. Ngozi reveals how Carbon seized this opportunity, starting with paper-based salary loans and evolving into a digital-first platform, revolutionizing consumer and SME finance in a market long dominated by risk-averse banks.

Ngozi shares the gritty details of Carbon’s journey, from its origins in debt collection to leveraging Nigeria’s rising smartphone penetration and payment infrastructure for its Paylater product. He discusses the power of proprietary credit scoring, which maintained a 10–13% loss rate through economic crises, and the hard lessons learned during COVID-19, when reactive decisions strained customer trust. With candor, Ngozi reflects on the complexities of transitioning to full-service banking and the strategic pivot to SME banking, driven by the insight that 50% of their retail borrowers were small business owners.

Looking ahead, Ngozi envisions Carbon as a “superpower” for customers, using AI and automation to solve not just financial but operational challenges for SMEs. From AI-powered cash flow tools to personalized advisory services, Carbon aims to redefine banking by addressing the “why” behind financial needs. This episode is a treasure trove of insights for fintech innovators, entrepreneurs, and anyone curious about building trust and value in one of Africa’s most dynamic markets.

70% of digital transformations in banks fail. The odds are even worse when you're pivoting from a niche corporate bank to a universal, tech-driven institution. But I&M Bank has bucked the trend.

In this episode, we sit down with Shameer Patel, Executive General Manager of Retail and Business Banking at I&M Bank. Shameer was instrumental in architecting I&M’s transformation—first from the CEO’s office, where he led strategy, and now at the helm of its fast-growing retail arm.