👨🏿‍🚀 TechCabal Daily – In banking, it’s out with the old

What do you do when you’re the third biggest bank in Nigeria by assets, and your online banking services suffer because of a banking platform switch? You stop the migration process and continue only when everything is right. 

That’s what Zenith Bank did when a glitch in its data migration process disrupted online banking services leaving customers unable to access their accounts. The bank will finalise the switch in October after resolving the problems.

Zenith is changing from Phoenix, a core banking software it previously used to Oracle’s Flexcube.

Switching from one banking platform to another is a difficult process that can get messy due to the huge amount of data housed on banking platforms. 

The bank will also need to revalidate all the data it migrated to prevent human errors and check the functionality of the new banking platform before it can finalise the process. Anything can go wrong in these stages and might have caused Zenith to pause its migration. 

This is the third banking platform switch that we are reporting in a month, a trend that has seen Sterling Bank and GTBank switch their banking platforms for varying reasons. 

While GTBank’s banking platform change went smoothly, Sterling’s left customers unable to access banking services. 

Switching banking platforms happens for different reasons and while customers should not feel the change except for an improvement in banking services, Zenith’s 33 million customers were unable to use online banking services for weeks. 

Next Narrative Africa, a Nigerian media production company and Kenyan-based investment firm HEVA Fund have launched a $40 million fund to invest in African films with budgets between $1 and $5 million. The fund, Next Narrative Africa Fund, targeting a first close in Q1 2025 and a final close by the end of Q4 2025, will provide equity investments in some projects while offering grants for others.

Access to funding is a crucial challenge for Africa’s indie filmmakers, and while Netflix and Amazon Prime’s investment in African content is useful, it can hardly close the gap. 

Equity financing could provide a solution. In 2023, the success of the “Black Book,” a film produced by several recognisable names in Nigeria’s tech ecosystem, showed what’s possible in film investing. 

Startup investing often requires a time horizon of seven to ten years, but movies—which offer more modest returns—can return money to investors in under three years.

Showmax’s pursuit of African streaming dominance has received a $164 million boost from parent companies MultiChoice and NBCUniversal. It brings the total amount invested in Showmax to $284 million.

In a trading update on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) on Thursday morning, MultiChoice said the latest investment will finance Showmax’s operating expenses and working budget. MultiChoice and NBCUniversal contributed according to their 70% and 30% shareholding respectively.

In November 2023, MultiChoice-owned Showmax surpassed Netflix’s subscriber count on the continent, with 2.3 million to Netflix’s 1.8 million. 

To gain more ground, Showmax will continue its investment into content and technology. Its long term goal is $1 billion in revenue in five years, trading profit breakeven by 2027, a 25% EBITDA margin (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortisation), and 20% free cash flow margins.

This week, Ghanaian cleantech Kofa secured $5m via an SPV from the Shell Foundation through its Transforming Energy Access (TEA) platform. (September 24)

Here are other deals for the week:

• Kwiks, an HRtech startup based in Morocco, raised $827k in funding from Azur Innovation Management (AIM). (September 23)
• Nigerian ed-tech startup Tespire secured an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding. The investors were not named. (September 25)

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more funding announcements. Before you go, our State of Tech in Africa H1 2024 Report is out. Click this link to download it.

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