The Flip

This year, $160 billion in remittance payments will be sent from the US to Latin America. $65 billion will be sent from the US to Mexico, the world's largest remittance corridor. 

Yet, the majority of payments will be sent via brick-and-mortar stores like Western Union or Moneygram. 

The future of payments is already here, yet most people are queuing in line, paying in cash, taking a photo of their receipt, and sendi...

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Khaman Maluach was just drafted 10th overall in the NBA Draft. He’s a South Sudanese refugee who grew up in Uganda and only started playing basketball when he was 13 years old. 

After first playing the game at Luol Deng’s basketball camp, Maluach played at the NBA Academy in Senegal, and played three seasons in NBA Africa’s Basketball Africa League, before signi...

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2025 is the year of stablecoins. 

Transaction volumes have grown to over $33 trillion in the past 12 months. The top Dollar-denominated stablecoins are the 17th largest holder of US treasuries globally. Tether, issuer the largest stablecoin by volume, USDT, announced $13 billion in net profit in 2024. Circle, the USDC issuer, is going public.

But what got the hype train going was Stripe’...

There are 1,696 active players in the NFL. Just 138 are African. 

But if it were up to Osi Umenyiora, 11-year veteran and 2-time Super Bowl Champion, there would be many more. 

Osi is the Founder of The Uprise, the NFL's lead in Africa, and he's pioneering American football on the African continent. 

At the NFL's camp in Lagos, Nigeria, young athletes are vying for a shot to join the NFL Academy in London or to go...

Farming is the number one source of employment in Africa, yet its agricultural productivity is the lowest of any region in the world. 

The opportunity is immense—60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land is on the continent—but rural communities are suffering from a lack of economic opportunity.

So young Africans are building innovative solutions to tackle the problems that are impacting their families and communit...

Reports suggest that climate change is set to cost the global economy $38 billion per year by 2049. Emerging markets need close to $2.4 trillion per year by 2030 to meet the climate goals. That's 4 times what is currently invested. 

But high capital costs are stalling clean energy investment across Africa. If you want to build a renewable energy project in Sub-Saharan Africa, the weighted average cost of capital would b...

Nigeria’s energy crisis has persisted for decades. Africa's largest country is largely powered by fuel generators. They're noisy, dirty, and bad for the environment. But they also provide power to millions of people in a country with an unreliable grid. 

The removal of Nigeria's long-standing fuel subsidy in 2023 caused the price of fuel to quadruple, leaving Nigerian consumers searching for options. And many are going sola...

Can Africa be a leader in the global fight against climate change? 

While the continent has contributed just 3 percent to global carbon emissions, it is the most impacted by climate change. But it also has a range of natural endowments that leave it well-positioned to build green industries that will have a positive economic impact locally and can play a significant global role in getting to net zero.

In this episode...

These climate investors are funding climate startups using a hands-on venture-building model to support founders across Africa. 

In this episode, we’re joined by James Mwangi from Africa Climate Ventures, Maxime Bayen from Catalyst Fund, and Lyndsay Holley Handler from Delta40.

We discuss why African ventures and climate startups, in particular, benefit from the venture building model; the limitations of the traditional two ...

There are millions of Moniepoint point-of-sale terminals in use across Nigeria. These point-of-sale devices power Nigeria’s offline economy, and while there are many competitors in this space, Moniepoint appears to beating them all. 

How did they do it? How did Moniepoint grow so quickly? And why has it become the preferred choice for agents and merchants across Nigeria?

In this episode, we hit the streets of Lagos w...

Small retailers in Nigeria power the economy. But they’re going through some tough times. Devaluation, food inflation, and overall poor economic conditions have made it especially hard for these small businesses to operate.

To better understand how retail works, and how these small businesses can grow, we hit the streets of Lagos with Deepankar Rustagi, CEO of OmniRetail.

OmniRetail was ranked Africa's #1 Fastest Gro...

One of the African tech ecosystem's largest exits was the 2020 sale of Sendwave to WorldRemit for $500 million. 

Sid Sridhar was Sendwave's Head of Business at the time, and in this episode, Sid shares his M&A lessons for the African tech ecosystem.

Sid is now the Head of Business at Wave, the mobile money company spun out of Sendwave that's competing head-on with the telcos in Francophone West Africa. Wave raise...

There is a $330 billion credit gap, according to the IFC. But why is it so hard to lend in African markets? 

We explore that question with Chijioke Dozie, Co-founder and CEO of Carbon, and Mark Straub, CEO of Smile Identity.

This episode was recorded live from the FT Partners Fintech in Africa Summit in New York City. Download their FinTech in Africa research report, published in March 2024.

00:00 - Introduction

In this episode, the third in our docuseries on jobtech platforms and the future of work, we dive deeper into the value chain, because the problems that small businesses have across the continent are multi-layered. 

In an environment of demand constraints and a lack of infrastructure, platforms need to solve multiple problems across the value chain. This is what makes jobtech platforms so hard to build in Africa. 

Bu...

Benjamin Fernandes, the Founder and CEO of the remittance platform NALA, likes to say that payments are just 1% built in Africa. 

Why are cross-border payments so hard? 

In this episode, we're joined in conversation with Benjamin Fernandes and Dan Kleinbaum, a co-founder of Beyonic, which sold to Onafriq, and now the Founder of the FX platform GTXN. 

This episode was recorded live from the FT Partners Fintech in A...

In this episode, we're joined in a panel conversation with the CEOs of three of Nigeria's biggest digital banks: Moniepoint's Tosin Eniolorunda, Kuda's Babs Ogundeyi, and FairMoney's Laurin Hainy.

This episode was recorded live from the FT Partners Fintech in Africa Summit in New York City. Download their FinTech in Africa research report, published in March 2024.

00:00 - Intro
01:18 - Moniepoint's distribution-fi...

In our first episode of this series on jobtech platforms and the future of work, we argued that the future of work is a tech-enabled portfolio of work. 

But what does a portfolio of work really look like? And what happens next? 

We know we need to create more formal jobs in Africa, and we need to boost the productivity of the informal sector. But how do we get there? 

Considering the context of the markets in ques...

In January 2024, we hosted a live show in Lagos with The Subtext's Osarumen Osamuyi on the relationship between the tech ecosystem and the media. 

It was a follow-up to a 2020 episode we published entitled Much Ado About the Media.

A lot of founders still feel the media is acting in bad faith amidst more accountable media coverage. In this episode, we explore this tension and have an important discussion with the ecosyst...

Live from the BIG Summit, a platform hosted by investor and 2x NBA All-Star Baron Davis, at the 2024 NBA All-Star Game, a conversation with three operators connecting Africa to the world through culture and commerce. 

In this conversation, we're joined by Clare Akamanzi, the CEO of NBA Africa, Abdul Karim Abdullah, the Founder and CEO of AfroFuture music festival, and entrepreneur and private equity investor Tuyee Yeboa...