South Africa’s banking MVNOs were conceived as a defensive weapon. Banks watched mobile operators build payments platforms, accumulate transaction data and push into financial services from the connectivity side. The mobile virtual network operator was the answer: own the mobile relationship, generate behavioural data between transactions and build switching costs that make the customer harder…
Every South African bank that has launched a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) – Capitec, FNB, Standard Bank, Nedbank and soon Absa – has built its mobile business on phone numbers it does not control. The international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) embedded in every Sim card belongs to the host network. The phone number –…
For years, African enterprises have faced a unique scissor gap: the urgent demand for digital transformation on one side, and the reality of unstable power grids, high cross-border bandwidth costs and a localised shortage of AI expertise on the other. In this context, pursuing outright ownership of underlying compute capacity risks trapping enterprises in a…
The four-year smartphone contract is becoming South Africa’s quiet answer to unaffordable phones – and a costly one for buyers who don’t read the fine print. A R30 000 purchase, spread over 48 months, can commit a buyer to more than R60 000 across the contract life when bundled airtime, data and insurance. The device…
The U.S. State Department announced Thursday that the Trump administration had approved $30 million in funding for the controversial, opaquely run private food distribution organization known as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has been criticized by a United Nations agency as “a death trap” for hungry Palestinians in the war-torn enclave. It is the first…
