Africa is providing cheap liquidity to wealthy nations. In return it is paying huge interest rates to external institutional investors at the cost of its own development. For instance, African central banks export their reserve funds for safekeeping. Sovereign wealth funds and pension fund managers invest only in investment-grade European and United States institutions. The…
MultiChoice Group has announced it will discontinue Showmax, drawing a line under one of Africa’s most expensive and ambitious streaming experiments. The decision brings to an end a platform that was launched in 2015 and relaunched at enormous cost in 2024, and which ultimately failed to achieve commercial viability in a market defined by low…
Visa is working to integrate stablecoins into existing payment systems, seeing an opportunity to maintain its market leadership as these tokens gain traction, Visa’s head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, said in an interview. Stablecoins, cryptocurrencies typically pegged to the US dollar, allow funds to be moved outside traditional banking systems. While their circulation has surged,…
Standard Bank has become the first African bank to directly integrate with China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), providing African companies with a faster route to pay Chinese suppliers in Renminbi, rather than routing transactions through the US dollar. The integration removes an extra step long embedded in Africa-China trade flows, where companies typically settled…
Africa’s continental free trade area offers long-term promise, but expecting it to quickly compensate for US trade losses may be unrealistic. There’s a lot of hype right now about how intra-African trade through the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) could replace the considerable loss of African exports to the United States (US) precipitated by…
