👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Ride-Hailing Woes and Banking Trends

While Nigeria’s Access Bank is easily the busiest M&A machine in the financial services space, fintech startup Risevest isn’t doing badly either. Two months after we first reported that it was in talks to buy the Kenyan fintech startup Hisa, the deal has officially closed. It’s Risevest’s second acquisition in a little under a year. 

Anatomy of the deal: Risevest and Hisa are fintech startups allowing a growing class of African retail investors access to global stocks and other investment options like real estate. An acquisition of Hisa, which has been approved by Kenya’s markets authority, allows Risevest to expand to Kenya without any hassle. Without this acquisition, getting a licence to operate a fintech in Kenya may have taken up to two years.

How much did this deal cost? Risevest and Hisa prefer not to say, although one person with direct knowledge of the deal said it was a cash and stock deal. While a 2022 fund raise valued Hisa at $5 million, it’s doubtful that it would have sold for anywhere near that price. Watch out for Kenn’s article on why this deal made sense for Hisa.

A nose for a deal? Risevest acquired Nigerian fintech Chaka in September 2023—it also declined to share the specifics of that deal. That deal made sense because it allowed Risevest to expand its slew of licences, said one person familiar with the deal. Chaka for instance, offered Nigerian stocks and was one of the first companies to receive a digital sub-broker licence from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 

Given that both companies’ investors were interested in making the 2023 deal happen, it is likely to have been a stock-only deal. 

Will we continue to see savvy dealmaking from Risevest as it adds more infinity stones spots more opportunities? Its CEO artfully sidestepped that question.

However, he spoke to us on what the future holds for Hisa under new ownership. 

Read about it here. 

How do the rich stay rich? By shrewdly keeping an eye on costs and ruthlessly pruning anything that may become a drag on their finances later.

That’s the story of Nigeria’s biggest commercial banks which reported a combined ₦9.51 trillion ($5.7 million) in profits in 2023. Some tier-1 banks briefly hit ₦1 trillion (($608 million) in market capitalisation despite Nigeria’s macroeconomic conditions.

Nigeria’s big banks have perfected the art of eking out profits regardless of the economic conditions and USD-denominated costs are the current enemy of that goal. The decision to float the naira has significantly increased technology costs; think storage, software licencing and even hardware. 

While banks are notoriously conservative businesses, we’re seeing some flexibility in how they’re thinking about technology costs. On Monday, Sterling Bank formally announced its move to SeaBaaS, a new core banking application. One person suggested that cost consideration may have played a part in the decision to have its custom software. 

Beyond software, local cloud players are also finding joy pitching to companies. With more competitive pricing than AWS or Azure, big organisations are trying new entities. 

Huawei, the Chinese enterprise company that went from upstart to a dominant player in the telecoms market, is also seeing and taking opportunities in the Nigerian banking space.

Here’s an excerpt from a TechCabal story about how Huawei sold some storage to United Bank for Africa (UBA), a tier-1 commercial bank; 

“They lure customers in with the option of a free-to-use one-year solution,” said one cloud engineer at another tier-1 bank, citing Huawei’s extended proof of concept that allowed banks to use specific solutions for free.

“No one else will offer you a one-year proof of concept,” another cloud engineer said. 

Read about it here. 

Kenyan and Nigerian gig drivers can trade places given how similar their challenges are. Two weeks after gig drivers in Kenya defied the almighty algorithms of Uber and Bolt to fix their own prices—that was always going to be shortlived for reasons I’ll explain later—Nigerian drivers are lightly copying the playbook. 

One gig driver in Lagos shared that trips under ₦3,000 ($1.82) are not worth his time; drivers are now telling customers to pay extra or cancel the trips. On Monday, my colleagues in Abuja took four trips on Bolt and Uber for which they had to pay above the prescribed prices. 

Is the gig driving model broken? Or are macroeconomic conditions spotlighting problems in a fragile business model? These questions are crucial as the gig economy faces increasing tensions between drivers and ride-hailing companies. Drivers in Kenya and Nigeria are protesting low fares, rising costs, and the perceived unfairness of the platform algorithms. 

Bolt and Uber increased fare prices by 13% and 15% respectively in Nigeria. One gig driver in Lagos told me that those price increments do not match the extra costs he has to pay for fuel. That driver’s sentiment is echoed in Kenya where drivers want a minimum base fare of KES300 ($2.33). 

Since February, the inflation rate in Egypt has been on a downward trend. 

Inflation eased from 35.1% in February to about 25.7% in July. This trend encouraged hopes of the first interest rate cut since 2020 and had analysts predicting a further drop in the inflation rate to about 21% by year-end. 

However, inflation figures for August may have bucked that trend. According to Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS), inflation rose to 26.2% in August up from 25.7% in July.

This increase was a result of the impact of fuel hikes on consumer and business transportation costs and an increase in electricity tariffs. Last month, Egypt raised prices of fuel products by 15% after it agreed with the International Monetary Fund to drop fuel subsidies. Food prices which constitute a bulk of the consumer price index also rose by 1.8%. 

While August figures are the highest in five months, analysts believe that it’s a temporary bump in the path to lower inflation. Analysts are optimistic of a return to a disinflation trend. 

The recent hike in fuel prices in Nigeria—whose inflation, last month, slowed for the first time in two years—may see the country experience the same inflationary pattern as Egypt. Analysts expect the recent increase in fuel prices to drive an increase in September’s inflation rate. The country will announce the August inflation rate next week.