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After convincing South Africans to be healthier through its Vitality programme, Discovery took this shared-value incentivisation idea to car insurance. The better you drive, the less insurance you pay – and fewer accidents happen. This highly-successful Vitality Drive telematics has already been exported to the UK, and is now being launched in Saudi Arabia. Discovery Insure deputy CEO Francois Theron and head of telematics Ilan Ossin tell Stuff Studios editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak about how South African innovation is going global. Read more on Stuff.

Having successfully launched in South Africa, and with an imminent launch in the Philippines, TymeBank is looking for further international expansion. Current SA CEO Tauriq Keeran tells Stuff Studios editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak about his transition into group executive for growth projects. Read more on Stuff.

Co-founder and CEO Katlego Maphai launched Yoco with three friends in October 2015. From a year-long beta with 500 merchants, they are now adding 10,000 new merchants a month. He tells Stuff Studio’s editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak about the phenomenal rise of this remarkable mobile payments business, that has now evolved into a payments platform. Read more on Stuff Studios.

Max Cuvellier’s not-insubstantial day job is head of mobile for development for the GSMA. But that’s not what he’s talking to Stuff Studio’s editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak about. His also not-insubstantial side-jig is a data newsletter called Africa: The Big Deal, which he runs with his good friend Maxime Bayen. This “one graph, one paragraph” weekly newsletter has tracked how fintech has exploded on the continent; while start-ups in Africa have raised $1.8bn in Q1 of 2022, 2.5x the amount raised a year before. Read more on Stuff Studios.

In 2015 Disrupt Africa began publishing its annual African Tech Startups Funding Report. Since then says Disrupt co-founder Tom Jackson, African tech startups have seen investments increase by 351% and culminating in a record $2bn in 2021. Half of that “incredible growth” was invested in fintechs, Jackson tells Stuff Studio’s editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak. A total of 564 startups raised a $2,148,517,500 in 2021 – more than treble (or 206%) over 2020. Read more on Stuff Studios.

Netstock.co is the biggest new thing you’ve never heard of. This innovative South African company, which was bought in 2020 to a US private equity firm, provides data science analytics to small businesses to manage their inventory. Amazingly, Netstocks’ acquisition came just as the global supply chain was hit by Covid-19 lockdowns, making this service even more essential. It took over a decade to become an “overnight success” as Stuff Studio’s editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak jokes with its remarkable chief technology officer and co-founder Barry Kukkuk. Read more on Stuff Studios.

“If I played you a track of music, could you tell if it was composed by a human or an artificial intelligence,” Tencent Africa CEO Brett Loubser asked an auditorium of people at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival’s digital conference, Creativate. Amazingly, nobody could. How AI and machine learning are being adapted for the most personal of skills – creativity – offer not only a fascinating look at how it is being achieved; but an equally intriguing insight into how AI could work in fintech. He spoke to Stuff Studio’s editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak. Read more on Stuff Studios.

In March 2007 in the most unlikely of places, a new era began for how us humans performed one of our most important activities: making payments. Until M-Pesa emerged in Kenya, financial transactions using the then rudimental 2G cellphones was extremely hard. Now, the grandfather of mobile money is part of a suite of offerings from its parent, Vodacom, which has a next-generation superapp of its own, VodaPay. He spoke to Stuff Studio’s editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak about the future of fintech in Africa. Read more on Stuff Studios.

Moya is often mistakenly compared to WhatsApp, the mega messaging app, when the more apt comparison is super app WeChat. Although its CEO Gour Lentell points out his datafree app’s biggest drawcard is free messaging – which is the thing they miss most when they run out of data, his research found. But Moya, which has 6.5m monthly active users, is also pivoting to fintech, launching its own mobile wallet, MoyaPayD. He tells Stuff Studio’s editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak about why datafree is the icing on the cake, but you still have to have good cake to make the whole offering work. Read more on Stuff Studios.

When two geeks tried to solve their own frustrations around rolling blackouts, they created a now-indispensable app called Eskom se Push. It now tells 2.5m South Africans every day what outages to expect from the power utility. Although the way Herman Maritz and Dan Wells have brought a county together, while demonstrating a key tenet of why innovation in Africa is better: innovation out of necessity. They tell Stuff Studios editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak about this remarkable app’s unusual journey to greatness. Meanwhile, a grateful nation thanks them. Read more on Stuff Studios.