In 2019, Oluwatomi Ayorinde was stranded in Mannheim, Germany. His Nigerian bank card, which had worked perfectly at home, simply stopped working abroad. He wrote down the experience—a habit he rarely indulged—because something about it nagged at him. Years later, while building his Y Combinator-backed fintech CrowdForce, it happened again.

Around the same time, Chizaram Ucheaga found himself in France, unable to access his own money, relying on someone else’s card to get by. He had spent years helping banks and agents move cash across Nigeria. If someone who understood payment rails as intimately as he did could still be rendered helpless by a border crossing, he reasoned, this was neither a glitch nor some error on his part.

Africa’s fintech revolution has been defined by the singular obsession of getting money into the continent. Remittances to Africa now exceed USD 100 B annually, with fees that can top 8% and settlements that take days. The largest transaction volumes, investor interest, and development funding have all been tied to inbound payments.

Remittance corridors have been engineered, optimised, and celebrated. Flutterwave, Sendwave, Chipper Cash and a host of others built fortunes solving the inbound problem. But the outbound direction—helping Africans spend, preserve, and move their wealth once they step outside the continent—remained a neglected, broken afterthought.

That neglect is what Ayorinde and Ucheaga are now trying to fix with Timon, a travel payments platform that has quietly processed over USD 47 M in transaction volume since its launch in September 2024, almost entirely through organic, word-of-mouth growth. The startup, recently backed by the notoriously selective crypto accelerator Alliance, now counts 100,000 users across 16 African countries and is deepening its presence in Kenya.

All this came to be because both men happened to cross paths while running an entrepreneurship group together in church, where Ucheaga advised startups as a director at the Founder Institute. After a Sunday church service, Ayorinde called Ucheaga into a car and pitched the idea, asking him to research it and give an honest verdict.

Ucheaga, whom Ayorinde trusted because he was “methodical and unemotional,” ran the numbers and came back with a simple answer: “We should do it.” What made the decision easy was that Ucheaga had hit the same wall years earlier. “We arrived at the same conclusion separately, through our own experiences, before we ever compared notes,” he said.

The accidental infrastructure

Notably, stablecoins—cryptocurrencies pegged to assets like the US dollar—were never on Timon’s original roadmap. The initial vision was a straightforward travel card for Africans, built for loading local currency and spending abroad. But users kept asking for something else. They wanted to fund their wallets with stablecoins.

Ayorinde and Ucheaga built the feature. Today, roughly 70% of all wallet funding on Timon flows through stablecoins.

“We stopped seeing stablecoins as just another funding option and started seeing them as the infrastructure layer for global travel payments,” Ucheaga said.

The shift reveals something counterintuitive about the African consumer. The narrative around cryptocurrency on the continent has largely focused on speculation or remittance substitution. But Timon’s user behaviour suggests a more pragmatic use case in preservation and portability. With currencies across the continent depreciating at unpredictable rates, holding value in a stable digital dollar is becoming less of a niche preference and more of a survival mechanism for a certain class of mobile professionals.

“The person moving money today isn’t always sending it home,” Ayorinde said. “They might be earning in dollars or stablecoins and need to spend that money wherever they physically are, which could be in a different country every month.”

The users who surprised them

When they started building, the founders assumed they were serving a relatively narrow slice of frequent flyers. They were wrong.

“We initially thought we were building for a niche,” Ucheaga said. “But it turned out to be much more.”

Parents using Timon cards to fund their children’s education abroad, avoiding the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of cross-border transfers. Remote workers earning in foreign currencies but living in Accra, Nairobi, or Lagos. Entrepreneurs whose work takes them from Johannesburg to London to Dubai in a single quarter. Some customers live in one country, earn in another, and spend somewhere else entirely—sometimes all three at once.

The company’s expansion strategy has followed this organic demand rather than a conventional market-entry playbook. Kenya emerged as one of Timon’s fastest-growing markets not because the founders targeted it, but because Kenyan users discovered the product through referrals and started pulling others in. The same pattern repeated across Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa.

“We don’t expand because the market looks attractive on paper,” Ayorinde said. “We expand because customers are already there.”

The scars of previous ventures

Neither founder came to this problem fresh. Both carry the weight of earlier failures and reinventions that shaped how they built Timon.

Ayorinde’s first startup, Mobile Forms, was an offline data collection product. It worked technically. Nobody wanted it. That failure forced a pivot as he realised customers didn’t just need software; they needed people on the ground to collect data, which led to CrowdForce, a network of field agents. CrowdForce eventually birthed PayForce, a financial services business that processed millions in monthly volume and was acquired by FairMoney in 2023.

“The biggest lesson is not to fall in love with a solution,” Ayorinde said. “Keep listening until you understand the real problem.”

At Timon, he applied that lesson with deliberate restraint. The company spent six months building and listening before scaling at all. “What took six years to learn at my previous venture, we applied in under two years at Timon.”

Ucheaga learned his lesson through a different kind of grind. In the mid-2000s, he helped build a two-way SMS platform for banks and pension administrators. When regulations restricted unsolicited messaging, the business had to pivot. They adapted digital pen technology for the Nigerian market and launched Mavis Talking Books, an offline learning platform that served over 20,000 learners.

“Every pivot begins with paying attention,” Ucheaga said. “If you’re willing to adapt to what the market is telling you, today’s setback can become tomorrow’s business.”

The financial passport

Timon now offers virtual and physical payment cards, cross-border transfers, local payouts, and global eSIMs, all accessible through a single app. Physical cards can be picked up at airports or delivered within 24 to 48 hours.

But the founders are restless with the “travel card” label. They describe what they’re building as a “financial passport”, a single platform that handles everything a traveller needs, from flights and accommodation to insurance and local spending, whether they’re an African leaving the continent or a foreigner entering it.

“Ten years from now, success means people only need two things when they travel: their national passport and their financial passport,” Ucheaga said.

For that vision to become reality, African finance needs to become dramatically more interoperable. The future, as the founders see it, isn’t about replacing banks or card networks but making it seamless to move between stablecoins, local currencies, cards, and local payment rails like M-Pesa.

Ayorinde is more direct about what he thinks is coming. “Stablecoins are not just another fintech trend,” he said. “They are changing the fundamental infrastructure of finance. I genuinely believe every financial institution that wants to remain relevant over the next twenty years needs a stablecoin strategy.”

The sceptic’s test

If a sceptical African bank executive challenged the premise, arguing that remittances remain the dominant opportunity, Ucheaga would put down the numbers first. Timon has processed USD 47 M, currently running at roughly USD 4.5 M a month, with users in 16 countries.

But the evidence he finds most persuasive is less the volume and more the qualitative signal.

“The feedback we hear most often from customers is: ‘it just works,'” he said. “That’s the whole case in three words. Legacy cards fail exactly at the moment a customer crosses a border, and currencies across the continent keep depreciating, pushing more people to hold and move value outside their local currency. That’s a different problem from remittances, and it’s the one we think the next decade of African fintech gets built around.”

Whether Timon becomes the financial passport of that future, or merely an early signal of a broader shift, remains an open question. But the problem it’s addressing is evident in the fact that African payment infrastructure has been a one-way valve for too long. The money flows in, but getting it out, or moving it around once one goes elsewhere, is still messy.

Two founders stranded in Germany and France, card in hand yet not able to spend, learned that lesson the hard way. They’re betting others won’t have to.

African banks are accelerating investment in artificial intelligence even as nearly one in three institutions cannot say whether the technology is generating value, a new report has found, highlighting a growing disconnect between spending and accountability as lenders race to modernise.

A survey of 277 senior banking executives across 37 African countries found that 83.2% of banks plan to increase AI investment over the next 12 months, according to the report by African Banker magazine in partnership with Backbase, a global leader in AI-powered banking platforms. Yet only 67.1% of institutions formally measure the return on those investments.

More strikingly, 82% of banks without any formal AI return-on-investment (ROI) framework still plan to expand spending, suggesting many lenders are committing more capital before proving existing projects are paying off. The findings point to a new phase in Africa’s AI adoption, where banks are shifting from experimentation to deployment under increasing pressure from boards and investors to justify technology spending.

“The question is no longer whether to invest in AI, but what the return on that investment is,” the report said, arguing that rising cloud costs, foreign exchange pressures and tighter data localisation rules are forcing banks to become more disciplined about digital investments.

Banks that do measure returns are largely being rewarded. Among institutions with formal ROI frameworks, 85.1% reported that AI projects either met or exceeded their original financial projections, while more than half said returns surpassed expectations altogether. Only about 15% said AI investments had failed to deliver anticipated value.

The report suggests that the problem is therefore not AI itself, but how banks govern and evaluate it. Institutions working with third-party AI vendors measure returns at more than twice the rate of those building entirely in-house, at 71.7% versus 31%, a gap the report calls the “partner premium”.

One of the more surprising findings is that senior executives responsible for approving technology spending are among the least likely to measure its success. Finance departments recorded the strongest accountability, with 82% tracking AI returns, followed by technology and innovation teams at 63.1%. Executive leadership measured ROI only 50% of the time, while risk and compliance teams performed even worse at 48.1%, despite being heavily involved in implementing AI systems.

Legacy architecture remains the sector’s single biggest constraint. Half of all respondents cited integration with existing systems as the primary internal obstacle. On average, 55.7 cents of every IT dollar spent by African banks goes toward maintaining legacy systems, even as nearly half of respondents rate those same systems as highly or fully capable of supporting AI, a gap the report identifies as a potential blind spot.

“African banks don’t have an AI problem; they have an architecture problem,” said Aymen Daoud, Regional Vice President for Africa at Backbase. “The institutions that treat integration as the plumbing to fix before scaling agents will spend less, comply more easily, and be the ones still standing when the current generation of models is inevitably replaced by the next”.

Fraud detection and transaction monitoring emerged as the most impactful AI use case, followed by credit scoring and alternative assessment for thin-file customers, an application the report identifies as a credible route to bringing more of Sub-Saharan Africa’s unbanked population into the formal financial system.

Despite the challenges, sentiment about AI’s role in African banking remains strongly positive, with 86.9% of respondents positive or very positive about its role over the next two years.

LemFi, the financial platform for people living and working across borders, has partnered with BVNK, an enterprise-grade stablecoin payments infrastructure company, to rebuild the rails beneath the diaspora economy. The partnership moves LemFi’s cross-border settlement onto BVNK’s regulated stablecoin payment infrastructure, delivering near-instant value transfers between markets at a fraction of the cost, without changing anything about how customers experience the app.

For the two million people who rely on LemFi to move money between the

In the UK, Europe, Australia, and North America, and their beneficiaries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the rails have always been the real problem. International payments still move through correspondent banking and SWIFT chains that can take days to settle and add cost at every hop. LemFi’s answer is to rebuild those rails on the fastest infrastructure available: with BVNK, settlement is routed over regulated stablecoin rails behind the scenes, then paid out in local currency at the destination.

The economics matter for the communities LemFi serves. According to the World Bank, the global average cost of sending remittances was 6.36% in the third quarter of 2025 — more than twice the United Nationsʼ Sustainable Development Goal target of 3% by 2030. Meeting the 3% target alone would return roughly US$20 billion a year to families worldwide. Faster, cheaper settlement is one of the most direct levers to close that gap, and it is exactly the layer that LemFi and BVNK are rebuilding.

The move rides a broader shift as stablecoins expand from the margins of crypto into mainstream payment infrastructure. Real-world stablecoin payment volumes reached US$7.4 trillion over the last 12 months, and analysts expect stablecoins to grow from around 3% of the cross-border payments market today to as much as 20% within a decade. For LemFi, the BVNK partnership operationalises the stablecoin settlement strategy it set out in May 2026, when Tether made a strategic investment in the company to power stablecoin-driven remittances across emerging markets.

Ridwan Olalere, co-founder and CEO of LemFi, said: ^“

^“The money that crosses borders still moves on rails built decades ago— slow, expensive, and quietly taxing the people who can least afford it.

We’re rebuilding those rails. Stablecoins let us settle near instantly and take out cost; BVNK gives us the infrastructure to do it safely and at scale.

Itʼs the start of something bigger that the financial system

and the diaspora economy should have had all along.^”

Crucially, the upgrade is invisible to the people who use it. Customers never touch a stablecoin, hold a crypto balance, or leave their local currency; the technology does its work in the background. By design, it is modern infrastructure under a familiar experience; this is what lets LemFi capture the efficiency of stablecoins while keeping the trust, simplicity and compliance its customers depend on. For LemFi, the partnership is as much about trust as it is about speed.

BVNK operates a compliance-first, enterprise-grade platform with 25+ licences and regulatory approvals across the UK, Europe, and the US as well as coverage in more than 130 countries. Its infrastructure already powers stablecoin payments for some of the worldʼs leading global enterprises.

Chris Harmse, co-founder and Chief Business Officer at BVNK, said

“Stablecoins are becoming the base layer for how the world moves money, and remittances are one of the clearest places that shift changes lives. LemFi has built deep trust with the communities it serves across Africa, Asia and beyond. Powering their settlement with our infrastructure means faster, cheaper transfers reach real families — exactly the kind of impact we built BVNK to deliver.”

The partnership is the latest step in LemFi’s evolution from a remittance specialist into a full-stack financial platform for globally mobile communities, spanning payments, credit, savings, and connectivity. It builds on a year of momentum that includes LemFi’s selection of London as its global headquarters, backed by a £100 million UK investment commitment, and a widening regulatory footprint across the UK, Europe, North America, Australia and key corridors in Africa and Asia.

Stablecoin settlement will roll out progressively across LemFi’s corridors and its broader product suite on a market-by-market basis, only where local central bank and regulatory frameworks support it.

Nigeria’s national grid collapsed at least four times in 2025, and another two times in the first two months of 2026. In January alone, it failed twice within a week. Power generation crashed from 3,825 megawatts to 39 megawatts in minutes, plunging a country of over 200 million people into darkness yet again.

By one count, the grid has collapsed more than 100 times over the past decade. The national grid, a patchwork of ageing infrastructure and insufficient generation, has failed so often that its collapses are barely newsworthy anymore.

But for a growing number of Nigerians, the grid’s fragility is no longer the crisis it once was, thanks to the emergence of battery rentals, a new kind of alternative that is being embraced in parts of the country.

MOPO, an Africa-focused battery rental company backed by Octopus Energy Group, just announced a USD 75 M agreement with Nigeria’s Rural Electrification Agency to expand its pay-per-use battery rental operations nationwide by 2030. The deal begins with a pilot program this year before scaling across the country over the next four years.

MOPO, which calls itself the largest battery rental provider on the continent, operates solar-powered charging hubs managed by local agents. Customers rent rechargeable batteries by the hour or day, use them to power phones, lights, televisions, fans and small appliances, then return them when depleted. In Lagos, residents rent power banks for just NGN 300.00 (USD 0.22) daily.

The model enables people to pay for electricity when they need it, for as long as they need it, without resorting to expensive solar panels and inverters, or generators guzzling petrol at well over NGN 1 K naira per litre these days.

Battery rental services are not a long-term solution to Nigeria’s energy crisis but a pragmatic response to an immediate problem. Some might say they are painkillers, not vitamins; treating a chronic condition rather than curing it.

“We solve a lot of the problems that mini-grids and solar home systems struggle with,” MOPO Chief Operating Officer Luke Burras told Bloomberg. “We rent batteries to customers for hours. We’re not asking them to buy an asset in the case of solar home systems, and we’re not asking investors to place a huge bet on their future usage as with mini-grids”.

Solar home systems require a significant upfront investment, often beyond the reach of low-income households. Mini-grids demand long-term commitment and sustained demand. Battery rental requires neither. It offers immediate, flexible and affordable access to electricity, priced in units that match how people actually earn and spend.

***

MOPO has completed more than 32 million battery rentals across six countries, including Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The company grew from 67 employees in 2022 to 126 by July 2026. It has attracted investment from Octopus Energy, Norway’s Norfund and the International Finance Corporation.

Other players are entering the market. In May, bPOWERd expanded into Lagos, launching battery rental hubs at Mobil fuel stations. Daily rates start from NGN 1.5 K (USD 1.10) for a 300Wh battery and NGN 3 K (USD 2.19) for a 1,000Wh battery, enough to power essential household appliances. The company claims its service is 70% cheaper than running a petrol generator.

Nigeria has the world’s largest electricity access deficit. Despite being one of Africa’s biggest economies, the country’s grid is unreliable and underfunded. Generators have become the default backup for millions, but fuel costs have risen sharply, making them increasingly unaffordable. Meanwhile, the adoption of home solar power systems remains hamstrung by huge upfront costs.

Battery rental sits in the gap between the grid and the generator. Providers say it offers reliability without ownership, flexibility without commitment, and clean energy without the emissions.

The market seems to agree. Climate tech has surpassed fintech as Africa’s top venture-funding sector, accounting for nearly 40% of annual investment in 2025. Battery rental is one of the clearest expressions of that shift. And while it’s hardly a cure for Nigeria’s energy crisis, it’s proving useful for millions of Nigerians who see it as a reliable source of power in a country where the grid fails as often as it works.

Airtel Africa is finally moving forward with the long-awaited listing of its mobile money unit, and banks are circling.

The company has revived plans to spin off Airtel Money in an initial public offering that could value the business at around USD 10 B and raise roughly USD 1.5 B. The listing is now expected in the second half of 2026, with London emerging as the preferred venue after the company abandoned plans for a Middle Eastern exchange.

The renewed push follows repeated delays. Airtel Africa had originally planned to list Airtel Money by 2025, then pushed the timeline to early 2026, and later postponed again, citing market uncertainties stemming from the Middle East conflict. The war-driven costs and volatile conditions made the first half of 2026 untenable.

But the geopolitical tensions that delayed the IPO also shaped its final destination. With the Middle East engulfed in conflict, London’s deep capital markets and broad international investor base became the clear choice. The company had been exploring exchanges in the UAE and elsewhere in Europe before settling on the UK capital.

Now, the momentum is building. Airtel Africa has been hiring more investment banks to join the syndicate managing the IPO, with Citi already leading the transaction. The additional appointments suggest preparations have entered a more advanced stage after months of uncertainty.

Airtel Money serves more than 54 million customers across Africa and generated USD 1.35 B in revenue in 2026. The business is highly profitable, with an EBITDA margin of 50.8%, exceeding the 49.3% margin of Airtel’s broader African operations. Mobile money penetration remains low at just 29% of Airtel Africa’s 184 million mobile subscribers, leaving significant room for growth, particularly in Nigeria, where only 2.7 million customers currently use the service.

If completed at the expected valuation, the IPO would be London’s largest new listing since Wise debuted in 2021 with a valuation of nearly GBP 9 B (~USD 11 B). Only a handful of companies have floated on the London Stock Exchange in the first half of 2026, making Airtel Money’s planned IPO a potentially landmark transaction.

Unlocking the value of Airtel Money through a separate listing could help investors better appreciate the strength of its fintech operations, which have often been overshadowed by its core telecommunications business. The company has been under pressure to list the unit, with a deadline approaching that could trigger a USD 515 M buyback if the IPO does not proceed.

Airtel Money’s journey to the public markets has been long and uncertain. But after three years of delays, shifting geopolitical dynamics, and persistent investor interest, the listing now appears to be within reach.

SweepSouth, an app that connects households with domestic workers, recorded its highest cancellation rate since the pandemic. Uber and Bolt are facing a shortage of drivers that has pushed up trip prices. Checkers Sixty60, the grocery delivery service, has seen riders flee in large numbers. The common thread is the departure of migrant workers.

Anti-immigrant protests that peaked on June 30 have pushed tens of thousands of people to leave South Africa, exposing a fundamental contradiction in that the very platforms that anti-migrant campaigners say are taking jobs from South Africans cannot function without the migrants who fill them.

Authorities have processed around 67,000 migrants for deportation or voluntary repatriation in recent weeks. Zimbabwe alone has said nearly 100,000 of its citizens have returned since late May. The real number is almost certainly higher. The impact on South Africa’s platform economy has been immediate and severe.

SweepSouth, which relies heavily on migrant workers for its domestic cleaning services, has seen a sharp rise in cancellations from workers too afraid to travel.

“This last week has been really rough in our industry,” CEO Lourandi Kriel told EWN. “What we see is that not only Zimbabweans but even South Africans are getting attacked just on suspicion that they might not be South African”.

Some workers have indicated they may return to their home countries in the coming months because they no longer feel safe.

The ride-hailing sector has been hit just as hard. At least half of e-hailing drivers are migrant workers, according to Tella Masakale, spokesperson for the National E-Hailing Federation of South Africa. There has been a noticeable absence of workers since the protests peaked. In response, Bolt temporarily deactivated airport dispatch areas to discourage drivers from congregating in large groups. Uber has told drivers they can decline or cancel trips where they feel unsafe without penalty.

In the delivery scene, migrants account for 70% of Shoprite’s Sixty60 delivery service, which has a fleet of nearly 10,000 motorcycle riders. A Johannesburg-based Sixty60 driver from Lesotho said seven of the 10 delivery riders with whom he started the job in June have already left.

Indeed, Shoprite has previously said that eight out of every 10 South African drivers quit before their 10-week training is over, leaving foreigners to fill the void.

The irony is not lost on observers. The protests were driven by frustration over unemployment, crime and years of weak growth. But the departure of foreign workers risks slowing the economy further.

“A fast outflow of migrant workers could hamper productivity and production in the near term and may slow economic growth,” Mpho Lenoke, economics programme leader at North-West University, told Bloomberg. “The immediate economic impact is likely to be negative unless it is accompanied by broader policies to address skills shortages, unemployment and labour-market challenges”.

For platform companies, the challenge is now operational. South Africa’s porous borders and lax law enforcement have made it easy for millions of migrants to enter the country, where they tend to work longer hours and for less pay and demand fewer benefits than locals. The same ease of movement is now being reversed, and the platforms that built their businesses on a flexible, low-cost migrant workforce are struggling to adapt.

The protests have delivered what they demanded; migrants are leaving. But the businesses that depend on them are now feeling the absence.

A Kenyan borrower took a KES 177.72 K (USD 1.375 K) loan from African Capital Limited, a licensed digital lender. When additional charges were applied, the balance climbed to KES 500 K (USD 3.869 K). The Competition Authority of Kenya had to intervene to get the disputed charges waived.

In another case, a borrower said Mwananchi Credit repossessed his vehicle two months after issuing a loan, despite an unresolved contractual dispute.

These are not complaints about rogue, unregulated lenders. These are cases involving licensed digital credit providers operating under the supervision of the Central Bank of Kenya.

Kenya amended its laws in 2022 to bring digital lenders under formal supervision, following years of public outrage over excessive borrowing costs, misuse of personal data and aggressive debt collection. The central bank has since licensed 252 digital credit providers, with more than 500 applications still pending. Licensed providers have issued 8.3 million loans worth KES 150 B (USD 1.16 B).

The complaints have not stopped. Rather, they have surged. The Competition Authority of Kenya recorded 355 complaints against digital lenders in the year ending June 2025, up from 67 the previous year. That made digital lenders the largest source of consumer complaints in financial services, accounting for nearly two-thirds of all grievances in the sector.

The authority attributed the trend to misleading representations, undisclosed charges and unilateral changes to loan terms. “This sector has, over the years, continued to record a high number of cases,” the watchdog said.

The financial services sector accounted for 564 of the 915 consumer complaints received during the year, or 61.6% of all cases. Microfinance institutions accounted for 113 complaints, while Saccos and commercial banks recorded 68 and 28, respectively.

The data suggests a disconnect between regulatory intent and market reality. Kenya’s digital lending market is now one of Africa’s largest testing grounds for app-based credit, with millions of borrowers accessing loans through apps and USSD codes.

The speed and convenience are real, but so is the information asymmetry built into the business model. Apps are polished and fast. The actual terms of the loan — the true interest rate, the penalties, the fees — are often disclosed late or not at all.

The central bank has acknowledged the gap. It barred unregulated digital lenders from forwarding the names of loan defaulters to credit reference bureaus and stopped the blacklisting of borrowers owing less than KES 1 K. The withdrawal of approvals for unregulated credit-only lenders, the bank said, was “in response to numerous public complaints over misuse of the credit information system”.

Ir appears at the moment that the licensing regime is expanding oversight but has yet to eliminate disputes between lenders and borrowers. The question is whether more licences will translate into better conduct, or whether the industry will continue to grow faster than the rules meant to govern it.

Uber has agreed to acquire German food delivery group Delivery Hero for USD 14.8 B, a deal that would give the ride-hailing giant control of two of Africa’s largest delivery platforms and dramatically expand its footprint on the continent.

Under the terms of the all-cash offer, Uber will acquire Delivery Hero’s operations in 50 markets, including the Glovo and Talabat brands, which have established strong positions across multiple African countries. Glovo operates in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, while Talabat has a significant presence in Egypt and across North Africa.

The deal, which values Delivery Hero at EUR 41.50 per share, would create a combined platform spanning 99 markets with USD 236 B in gross bookings. Uber expects the transaction to close in the second half of 2027, subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals.

For Africa, the acquisition could mark a turning point in the continent’s rapidly growing food and grocery delivery market. Uber currently operates ride-hailing services in several African cities but has a limited delivery footprint. By inheriting Glovo’s established merchant networks and last-mile logistics, the company would gain an immediate foothold in some of the continent’s fastest-growing digital economies.

“Through Glovo, Delivery Hero has established a strong presence across several African markets,” an analysis of the deal noted. “If the acquisition receives regulatory approval, Uber would inherit one of the continent’s largest food and grocery delivery platforms, significantly expanding its footprint beyond ride-hailing.”

The acquisition comes as Africa’s digital commerce sector accelerates, driven by rising smartphone adoption, expanding mobile payments and growing demand for on-demand services. The African food delivery market alone is projected to reach billions of dollars in the coming years, making the continent a strategic priority for global delivery companies.

However, the deal is expected to face antitrust scrutiny in several jurisdictions because of the combined company’s market share. To ease regulatory concerns, Delivery Hero has agreed to divest operations in 14 overlapping markets to New York-based investment firm SSW Partners for approximately USD 1.6 B before the transaction closes. Glovo’s operations in Spain and Poland are among the businesses being sold.

Delivery Hero’s management board and supervisory board have unanimously supported the offer and intend to recommend that shareholders tender their shares. Prosus, which holds the second-largest position in Delivery Hero, has agreed to participate by tendering its approximately 17% stake.

Uber has committed to keeping Delivery Hero’s Berlin headquarters open and leaving its German workforce unchanged through at least 2029. For consumers and businesses across Africa, no immediate changes have been announced. Glovo and Talabat will continue operating as usual until the transaction is completed.

But industry analysts expect Uber to eventually evaluate opportunities to integrate technology platforms, logistics operations and merchant services across its delivery businesses. The combined company would have the scale to invest more heavily in logistics technology, route optimisation and merchant partnerships, potentially reshaping Africa’s delivery landscape.

Douglas Kendyson has spent the last decade building Selar into Africa’s largest creator platform, a bootstrapped company that now hosts over 400,000 creators across Nigeria and 13 other African countries. In 2025 alone, Selar paid out roughly NGN 18 B (USD 12.86 M) to creators. The company, according to Kendyson, its founder and CEO, has never missed a tax obligation, fulfilling nearly nine-figure payments last year.

None of that appears to matter to the Lagos State Internal Revenue Service.

In an open letter posted on X Wednesday, Kendyson publicly accused the LIRS of hounding Selar over a backdated 5% royalty fee on all sales. He appealed to Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu and Minister of Art, Culture, Tourism and the Creative Economy, Hannatu Musa Musawa, to intervene.

“We are a software company,” he wrote. “There is no reason LIRS is hounding us for a backdated 5 percent royalty fee on all sales when we’ve clearly explained our line of business”.

Hi @jidesanwoolu, @hanneymusawa

I’m deeply disappointed in your @lirs_govng team hounding Selar in the name of claiming creator royalty taxes. I turn 30 in Oct and I’ve spent the last 10 years building Selar, so this is what the youth mean by policies being created to crush…

— Douglas Kendyson (@KendysonD) July 15, 2026

Selar operates as an e-commerce and software platform enabling creators to sell digital products such as e-books, online courses, event tickets and other content. The company charges a commission of around 4%, a significant portion of which is paid to payment providers.

After payment gateway charges, Selar’s net margin is 1% to 3%. Kendyson has argued that Selar’s business model is identical to Shopify or Teachable; software platforms that charge transaction fees, not royalty-collecting intermediaries.

The LIRS appears to see it differently. Under Nigeria’s new tax regime, which took effect in January 2026, personal income tax for creators is administered by state authorities and applies to income from digital products, royalties, commissions and sponsorships. Distinguishing between royalty payments and service or commission income is crucial, as royalties for the use of intellectual property often face specific treatment, including potential withholding tax obligations.

***

If the LIRS succeeds in reclassifying Selar’s transaction fees as royalties, the implications would be significant. Kendyson, not one to shy away from taking matters public having notably locked horns with a rival earlier this year, framed the demand as a tax on Selar’s entire creator base rather than on the company itself. A 5% royalty fee would force the platform to raise its pricing and pass the cost down to creators who already pay personal income tax on their earnings. “No creator company in the world charges as high as even 5%,” Kendyson wrote.

The dispute highlights a growing tension between Nigeria’s ambitions for its creator economy and the tax enforcement practices that threaten to undermine it. The federal government has targeted the creative sector to contribute significantly to GDP, with some projections aiming for USD 100 B by 2030. Yet Selar, the platform that has done more than any other to build that economy, is being treated as a revenue source as opposed to a partner in growth.

Kendyson noted that Selar’s Smart Hustle anti-fraud initiative, a corporate social responsibility contribution to consumer protection, should arguably qualify the company for tax rebates. Instead, he said time and money that should be spent investing in the business and contributing to GDP are being consumed by a “long back and forth”.

The LIRS has not publicly responded to Kendyson’s accusations. But the dispute lands at a sensitive moment for the agency, which has been publicly credited with helping push Lagos State’s internally generated revenue past NGN 1.3 T (~USD 942 M) in 2024.

The outcome of this dispute, for Selar’s 400,000 creators and the thousands more waiting to join the platform, will determine whether Nigeria’s creator economy can continue to grow, or whether it will be stifled by a tax regime that hardly considers how it works.