👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – StanChart moves to sell Kenya office

Good morning.☀️

In Africa, particularly East Africa, Standard Chartered appears to be narrowing its focus toward wealthy clients. But internationally, its growth strategy is decidedly crypto-first.

Bloomberg reported that StanChart’s investment arm backed Hong Kong-based crypto trading firm GSR at a $1 billion valuation, the latest in a string of digital asset moves. The UK bank turned bullish on crypto in 2025, becoming one of the first major banks to offer spot crypto trading, and was reportedly weighing an acquisition of crypto custodian Zodia in April 2026.

While StanChart tilts toward wealthy clients in Africa, its international strategy hinges on crypto, where other major systemic banks, including HSBC and JP Morgan, have made defining moves across several jurisdictions.

Get smarter about Francophone Africa—the startups, tech policies, and institutions building the pipelines for ecosystem growth.

Standard Chartered (StanChart) Kenya, the country’s eighth-largest bank by assets, is putting its East African headquarters in Nairobi up for sale, Bloomberg reported on Monday. 

The seven-storey building, sitting on 1.88 acres in the capital city, will likely be collateral damage in a market where the lender cut employees by 5.9% in 2025. StanChart has already sold two other properties in Kenya, including one in Nyeri, in 2025, signalling a reduction in its physical assets.

State of play: StanChart Kenya has steadily reduced its workforce since 2014, cutting headcount from a peak of 2,048 to 942 by the end of 2025, as it prioritises wealth banking.

While the move could signal its continued downsizing or refocus, StanChart said it still plans to maintain an active presence in Kenya. 

And this explanation tracks as the lender recently said it wants to target Kenyan high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs), strategically reducing its operations in retail banking, where larger Kenyan banks, like Equity and KCB, hold all the leverage. According to the National Taxpayers Association (NTA), Kenya has 7,200 HNWIs, one of the highest in Africa, and a sizeable market for StanChart to aggressively pursue.

Between the lines: StanChart’s overall assets under management for its affluent banking segment have grown steadily over the past decade. The bank’s affluent assets under management (AUM) now stand at $447 billion, up at a compound annual growth rate of 11% since 2017. Growth has been sharpest in recent years, with affluent AUM rising 64% between 2023 and 2025, the strongest two-year run in the period, signalling that the bank is simply following the money upmarket. 

It is a strategy that is playing out in Kenya, too, where the bank has been pivoting toward the affluent segment. 

Zoom out: StanChart is expanding in Africa, launching full banking operations in Egypt in 2024 and opening a representative office in Casablanca, Morocco.

Last Thursday, South Africa’s Home Affairs, its digital identity and immigration authority, withdrew a draft policy after it cited non-existent sources fabricated by AI and suspended two officials.

On Tuesday, the same department is back with another draft, and this one is more ambitious than anything it has tried before. Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber has gazetted draft regulations for South Africa’s national digital identity system, built around a smartphone app called MyMzansi. 

What is changing: The proposed rules allow South Africans to store digital versions of their ID, birth certificate, and marriage certificate on their phones, and verify their identity remotely using facial recognition, no Home Affairs queue required. Public comments are open until June 6.

The digital ID app isn’t replacing physical Smart ID cards. It sits alongside them, as a mobile boarding pass next to a printed ticket. 

Banks, insurers, and government platforms can also verify identities through a secure digital link, and every check has to be logged and kept on record for seven years.

Law enforcement will also need a warrant to access population register data through the app. Misuse, such as enrolling under a false identity or bypassing facial recognition, carries a fine or up to 2 years in prison.

Zoom out: The infrastructure will sit inside the South African Revenue Service’s (SARB) hosting environment, with facial recognition as the primary biometric. The draft will require enrollment points in every municipality, and says it will provide a setting for people without smartphones to enrol.

PalmPay – Built for Ambition. Built for You.

PalmPay is Built for Ambition. Built for Nigeria. Built for You. With over 35 million users and a 99.9% transaction success rate, PalmPay is making digital banking safer, simpler, and more reliable for everyday Nigerians. Download the app to learn more.

Mauritania is getting its second submarine cable

For years, Mauritania has been connected to the world by a single thread: the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) cable system, running along West Africa’s coast to Europe. One cut and the country’s entire international Internet connection goes dark. That is about to change.

Mauritania has begun coastal installation of a second submarine cable operated by EllaLink, a cable linking Nouadhibou, a city in northwestern Mauritania, to Madrid, Spain. The cable carries an initial capacity of 200 Gigabits per second (Gbps), scalable to 12 Terabits per second (Tbps), with a direct onward link to South America. 

Full deployment is expected in August 2026, completing a project that began in July 2025, with service launching by January 2027. The cable is backed by the European Investment Bank, the European Union’s Connecting Europe Facility Digital (CEF Digital) programme, and $34.5 million in funding.

Between the lines: As of 2025, only 37.4% of Mauritanians use the Internet, leaving 3.35 million people offline. The Internet Society rates the country’s upstream diversity as poor, and one Gigabyte (GB) of mobile data costs 19.5% of the average monthly income.

A second cable solves the redundancy problem and should, in theory, push wholesale bandwidth costs down. But Mauritania completed a 4,000-kilometre (km) national fibre backbone in 2021 with a promise of a 25% cut in mobile data prices. Internet prices have risen 8% since. Without regulatory pressure on operators, the cable upgrades the backbone while everyday costs stay high.

The bigger opportunity is regional. Mauritania now sits on a transatlantic route, positioning it as a potential transit point for traffic across West Africa and the Atlantic. Whether that translates into a genuine digital economy story depends on what gets built once the cable lands.

Moonshot is back!

Moonshot 2026 is coming! Join us at the National Theatre, Lagos on October 28 & 29 for two days of tech and innovation. Grab your early bird tickets now and get 15% off.