Nearly all Egyptian consumers use artificial intelligence to help them shop, but only a fraction trust AI to complete a purchase on their behalf; a paradox that reveals a broader challenge facing the global payments industry as it rushes to build infrastructure for autonomous commerce.

A Visa study released Tuesday found that 91% of consumers in Egypt have used AI tools to assist with shopping, comparing prices, checking reviews and finding gift ideas. Fully 97% say the technology makes online shopping faster and easier. Yet when asked whether they would trust an AI agent to handle checkout, that figure collapsed to just 38%.

The findings, from the annual Stay Secure survey conducted by Wakefield Research, lay bare the gap between consumer appetite for AI-assisted discovery and their reluctance to cede control of the payment itself. The study surveyed 5,800 adults across 17 markets in Central Europe, the Middle East and Africa, including Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa.

The trust gap is not unique to Egypt. In South Africa, only 23% of consumers would trust an AI agent to complete a purchase, according to the same study. In Kenya, that figure stood at 29%. Across the region, consumers are embracing AI for research, but they draw a firm line when money changes hands.

“Consumers see fraud protection as a shared responsibility, but they expect financial institutions, governments, and payment providers to take the lead,” said Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president for North Africa, the Levant and Pakistan.

The study also revealed a rapidly shifting e-commerce landscape. Eighty‑five percent of Egyptian consumers have purchased products directly through social media platforms. But as commerce migrates to new channels, fraud follows. Among consumers who reported experiencing a financial scam in the past 12 months, some 36% of respondents, nearly half said the incident occurred on social media, more than on any other platform.

In 2025 alone, Egyptian authorities said they thwarted financial fraud operations worth an estimated EGP 4 B (approximately USD 77 M), according to statements from the Central Bank of Egypt. Across the continent, an Interpol‑coordinated operation in early 2026 involving 16 African countries resulted in 651 arrests and exposed scams tied to over USD 45 M in losses.

The findings arrive as Visa, Mastercard, and other payments giants race to prepare financial institutions for agentic commerce – autonomous transactions executed by AI agents with minimal human involvement. Visa has already begun enrolling banks in its Agentic Ready programme, which enables institutions to process such payments.

But as the Egypt data makes clear, the infrastructure is arriving ahead of consumer trust. Asked who should bear primary responsibility for fraud protection while shopping online, nearly half of Egyptian consumers pointed to government authorities. Only 13% believed consumers themselves should be primarily responsible.

The path forward remains uncertain for payments companies. Consumers have demonstrated they will use AI to discover products and compare prices. Whether they will ever trust it to spend their money remains an open question.

Feature Image Credits: Consultancy-ME

Nearly five years after its high-profile launch as Africa’s first central bank digital currency, Nigeria’s eNaira is being quietly repurposed. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has acknowledged in a new strategy document that adoption of the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) has been slow, and is now repositioning it away from a consumer-facing payment tool toward a backend infrastructure for government disbursements and cross-border settlements.

The eNaira, launched in October 2021 to much fanfare, has struggled to gain traction. According to the CBN’s Payments System Vision (PSV) 2028 strategy, unveiled on June 1, the CBDC currently has “millions of wallets” but has processed only about NGN 22 B (USD 16 M) in transactions. This is a fraction of the nearly 1 quadrillion naira in total electronic payments processed in 2024, and well below the 300 million transactions the bank had envisioned for the digital currency by 2026.

In the PSV 2028 document, the CBN acknowledged that barriers to the eNaira’s success included “limited stakeholder engagement and buy-in” during its design and implementation. The bank conceded that adoption had been slow, with the CBDC offering little that existing bank apps, fintech wallets and mobile money platforms were not already providing more conveniently.

Rather than competing directly with these established platforms, the CBN now wants the eNaira to become part of the infrastructure that underpins Nigeria’s digital payments ecosystem. The strategy, which runs through 2028, places the CBDC alongside initiatives such as open banking, digital identity and cross-border payments frameworks.

The rethink comes amid a broader strategic shift at the CBN under Governor Olayemi Cardoso, who has prioritised stabilisation, trade facilitation and investor confidence.

The PSV 2028 framework, unveiled at a gathering of banking executives and fintech operators in Abuja on June 1, aims to position Nigeria among Africa’s leading payment ecosystems by promoting faster, safer digital transactions and strengthening cross-border payment systems under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

The path forward for the e-naira will focus on government-to-person (G2P) payments, such as welfare disbursements and subsidies, as well as cross-border settlements. “Routing every government payment through the eNaira is where the plan argues with itself,” noted one analysis of the strategy, pointing to the tension between the CBDC’s past failures and its future ambitions.

The repositioning reflects a quiet admission that Africa’s first CBDC experiment, once hailed as a landmark step toward a cashless economy, has fallen short of its original promise. Now, the CBN is betting that a more utilitarian role can salvage the project.

Africa’s tech ecosystem had its best funding year since 2022 as startup investments rebounded last year, ending the slump of the previous two years, thanks to record debt financing and a steady recovery in equity markets. Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt together accounted for much of the capital raised.

The money is back, but something else is quietly choking the continent’s startup ambitions. A common view among stakeholders suggests that it’s not a lack of ideas or market, but rather leadership.

When Moniepoint CEO Tosin Eniolorunda told a Lagos audience that his company had struggled to fill 500 vacancies because Nigerian candidates were “not up to global standards,” the internet exploded. Some called it an insult, others said he was telling an uncomfortable truth. But Marcia Ashong‑Sam, founder and CEO of the executive search and leadership advisory firm, TheBoardroom Africa, has a different take.

“The question was never whether African professionals are capable,” she tells WT. “It was whether the organisations they work within are built to draw that capability out.”

Ashong‑Sam sees a painful irony every other day. “Founders will tell you in one breath that talent is their biggest challenge, and in the next, allocate the smallest slice of their budget to developing it.” Why? “Because leadership development gets treated as a cost centre, not a strategic growth lever. When you are racing to hit targets or close a round, teaching your VP of Product how to make better decisions feels abstract. Product and customer acquisition feel real. So the money flows to what feels urgent.”

But there is a deeper structural bias. The capital that flooded Africa over the last decade was priced for speed and market capture. “Investors focused more on growth metrics than leadership capacity or organisational maturity,” Ashong‑Sam says. “So founders optimised for what they were measured on.”

Many also assumed talent could simply be hired rather than developed. “That assumption is where the model breaks down,” she warns. “You cannot hire your way out of every talent challenge. At some point, you have to build capability internally.”

So what separates the companies that actually do this from the ones that collapse under their own weight? High‑performing organisations, she explains, “do not just recruit talent. They systematically compound it.” Ashong-Sam holds the view that the organisations that fare better treat leadership development as an operational discipline, not something delegated entirely to HR.

“They build clear succession plans, conduct regular talent reviews, and give people early exposure to cross‑functional responsibilities. And they think several layers ahead. Building tomorrow’s leadership bench with the same intentionality they bring to building their product,” she explains

There’s another dimension that gets missed entirely. “Organisations frequently hire people because they are excellent at one specific thing,” Ashong‑Sam notes. “The assumption is that technical excellence will advance a career. It rarely does on its own.”

What actually determines who grows into leadership is the ability to lead people, translate strategy into action, and navigate uncertainty, she asserts. “Those are human skills, and they have to be developed with genuine commitment. A well‑rounded career requires a well‑rounded professional.”

So how do you know if your company is hitting a leadership ceiling instead of a product or market problem? Ashong‑Sam says the most reliable early warning is decision velocity.

“When a company that was once agile becomes slow, when simple decisions require multiple sign‑offs and teams are waiting weeks for clarity, that is a leadership architecture problem.”

Another signal is what happens to high‑potential people. “High turnover among strong performers,” she tells WT, “particularly when they are leaving not for better compensation but because they do not feel they are growing or being heard, is a leadership culture signal that precedes deeper difficulty.”

In her view, boards often miss this because they are watching revenue, churn and burn rate, but those only tell you what has already happened.

“What boards should be tracking is succession depth, voluntary attrition, and the gap between what the organisation says its strategy is and how it actually behaves day to day.” She recommends a simple test: “Who runs this if you step away for six months? If the honest answer is that it falls apart, the board is sitting on a leadership risk.”

The debate that erupted over Moniepoint’s CEO’s comments stopped at exactly the wrong place, Ashong‑Sam argues. “A person can have full competency on paper and still be set up to fail if the organisation has not invested in building their capacity to lead.”

The leadership guru also criticises the tendency of many organisations to expect world‑class performance without world‑class development structures. “When outcomes disappoint, the individual gets the blame rather than the environment. That misdiagnosis is costly,” she says, “both for the person whose reputation suffers unfairly and for the organisation that learns nothing and repeats the same conditions with the next hire.”

Africa’s workforce is young, growing and ambitious. Sub‑Saharan Africa is expected to add 620 million people to the global workforce by 2050. That is either a dividend or a disaster, depending on who is building the systems to lead them.

Ashong‑Sam’s final lesson for the tech ecosystem is urgent. “Pipeline building does not have to wait for maturity or scale. The intent has to be present early, built into the culture before the organisation is large enough to feel the absence of it.” The capital is back. The question is whether the leadership will follow.

Tosin Eniolorunda, founder/CEO of Nigeria’s largest fintech by transaction volume, Moniepoint, has fired the starting gun on credit layering, which is shaping up to replace payments as the new battleground in Nigeria’s vibrant fintech scene. And industry insiders say the battle over customer deposits will be key to that.

Speaking at the official launch of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Payments System Vision (PSV) 2028 framework in Abuja, the Moniepoint Group CEO argued that the next phase of growth for the country’s digital economy lies in building credit products directly on top of existing payment rails.

“I believe the next phase of growth will come from layering services like credit onto existing payment flows, using the visibility and trust already built through financial transactions,” Eniolorunda told a panel of industry leaders, including the heads of NIBSS, Remita and SANEF. “For many small businesses, access has always been the real barrier.”

Moniepoint has already demonstrated the firepower of that model. Its microfinance bank disbursed more than NGN 1 T (USD 734 M) in credit to SMEs in 2025, financing thousands of provision stores, pharmacies and building materials sellers across the country. The company processed NGN 412 T (USD 302 B) in transaction value last year, powering an estimated 80% of in-person digital payments nationwide.

Yet the credit push is merely the visible front of a deeper strategic pivot. An emerging consensus among analysts and executives is that the coming fight will not be merely about lending, but about the cheap deposits required to fund it profitably.

“Large fintechs are not going to borrow expensive money to lend, they also won’t be depending solely on float.” industry veteran Victor Asemota pointed out, suggesting operators will deploy customer deposits, leveraging microfinance bank licenses to build balance sheets that can compete with traditional commercial banks.

That puts the spotlight on the deposit side of the equation. Banks have long held a monopoly on low-cost retail and corporate deposits. But fintechs, such as Moniepoint, OPay, PalmPay, FairMoney, Flutterwave and Paystack, have been quietly accumulating user bases that rival or exceed those of many Tier-2 banks. OPay and PalmPay alone have over 80 million users between them, while Kuda and Moniepoint serves 7 million and 16 million individuals, respectively.

A recent report by Credit Direct Ltd, a leading non-bank lender, forecasts that Nigeria’s credit market will split over the coming decade. Banks will concentrate on corporate and secured lending, it argues, while non-banks will lead consumer and informal-sector credit, powered by embedded finance and AI underwriting.

That structural realignment is already forcing traditional banks to defend their turf. Analysts have tipped neobanks to aggressively poach customers from legacy lenders in 2026, while Flutterwave’s recent acquisition of a microfinance bank license was described as creating a “tectonic shift” in the competitive landscape. The CBN has also formalised the nationwide status of fast-growing fintechs, effectively placing them closer to deposit money banks on the competitive spectrum.

Governor Olayemi Cardoso underscored the stakes at the PSV 2028 launch. “Inclusion and not exclusion must define our future,” he said, setting a target of 95% financial inclusion by 2028 — incorporating 50 million more Nigerians into the formal banking system. Achieving that goal will require regulators, banks and fintechs to work together, he warned against the country’s historic “start-stop” policy cycles.

Moniepoint is not alone in positioning for this shift. FairMoney disbursed over NGN 150 B in loans to small businesses in 2025. PalmPay and OPay have built mass-market payment networks and lending features. Flutterwave’s 2 million-strong Send App user base now has a banking licence behind it. Paystack, too, has acquired a microfinance bank licence, though it faces a significant competitive gap against larger incumbents.

Uganda’s central bank is tightening the screws on cash, imposing new withdrawal and cheque limits in its strongest push yet toward a cashless economy, even as the government’s own digital transaction taxes threaten to undermine adoption.

The Bank of Uganda, in a circular issued last week, set daily over‑the‑counter cash withdrawal caps of UGX 50 M (USD 13.7 K) for individuals and UGX 500 M (USD 137 K) for businesses. Weekly limits are set at UGX 250 M and UGX 2.5 B, respectively. The rules take effect on Jan. 1, 2027.

“In line with the Bank of Uganda e‑payments strategy, which aims to promote a cash‑lite economy as part of the broader national digitisation agenda,” the central bank said it had also reduced interbank cheque limits and introduced the withdrawal caps, according to the circular.

The move comes as digital payments surge. According to the central bank’s own data, electronic money transaction values in the East African nation rose 28% in 2025 to UGX 366 T (USD 100.3 B), while transaction volumes grew 17.3% to 9.1 billion. Mobile money remains the primary driver, with transaction values jumping 40% to UGX 66.1 T last year.

But a 0.5 percent excise duty on mobile money cash withdrawals, charged on top of service fees, is creating friction. Telecommunications firms MTN Uganda and Airtel Uganda told Parliament’s finance committee in April that the levy disproportionately hurts low‑income users. The operators are pushing for a reduction to 0.25 percent, arguing it would stimulate usage and ultimately lift tax revenue.

“When you send money for Parish Development Model, Emyooga, women down there will suffer the tax burden, they are your taxpayers,” MTN’s Dennis Kakonge told lawmakers.

The cost has sparked a shift. Agency banking transaction values rose 76% in 2025 to UGX 29.4 T as consumers seek cheaper channels, according to industry data. The number of agents expanded to more than 22,000. Refactory CEO Michael Niyitegeka, a tax expert, called the current framework “a distortion in the digital payments ecosystem,” noting that the tax burdens one channel while similar banking transactions attract lower costs.

The central bank’s restrictions may backfire if the cost of digital channels remains prohibitive. But mobile money remains the most accessible payment option for households and small merchants, even with the levy.

Amazon has launched its paid Prime service in South Africa, deploying the loyalty engine that underpins its global dominance two years after the U.S. e‑commerce giant quietly entered the country’s crowded online retail market.

The subscription, priced at ZAR 59 (USD 3.20) monthly or ZAR 399.00 annually, offers unlimited same‑day delivery in major metros, access to Prime Video streaming and Amazon Luna cloud gaming, as well as exclusive entry to the company’s annual Prime Day sales event, scheduled for June 23‑29. The launch makes South Africa the 27th country to receive the service.

Amazon’s marketplace went live in South Africa in May 2024 to a muted reception, with limited product selection and no Prime offering in place. Nearly two years later, independent data suggests the platform has gained traction. During the 2025 Black Friday period, Amazon recorded the third‑highest transaction value among customers of both FNB and Discovery Bank, trailing only Takealot and Checkers Sixty60. One logistics partner, The Courier Guy, processed a peak of nearly 224,000 deliveries for Amazon in September 2025.

“Since launching Amazon in South Africa two years ago, we have built a store our customers love, with a great selection of local and international products backed by a reliable delivery experience,” Robert Koen, managing director for Sub‑Saharan Africa at Amazon, said in a statement. “Launching Prime is the next exciting milestone on our journey in the country.”

The move ratchets up pressure on incumbent rivals. Naspers‑owned Takealot remains South Africa’s largest e‑commerce platform, holding about 45% of regular online consumers, but its market share has fallen from 35% in 2020 to 24% in 2025.

Takealot introduced its own TakealotMore subscription service days after Amazon’s entry, while Shoprite’s grocery delivery app Sixty60 has emerged as a formidable competitor.

South Africa’s online retail sector remains underpenetrated, accounting for an estimated 5%‑8% of total retail sales, a gap that Koen said presents a growth opportunity. Amazon has expanded its physical footprint to support the push, including more than 4,000 pickup points across the country and delivery coverage extending into rural areas.

“We want to price it at an affordable level, which I think adds a lot of value in the offering,” Koen told local media. Customers can sign up for a 30‑day free trial before committing to the subscription.

Canal+ began trading on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange on Wednesday in a secondary listing that fulfils a key regulatory pledge tied to its USD 3.2 B acquisition of MultiChoice, as the French media group doubles down on live sports rights to reverse steep subscriber losses at Africa’s largest pay-TV operator.

The listing, the first ever by a French company on the JSE, comes eight months after Canal+ took full control of MultiChoice, which has shed nearly three million linear subscribers over the past two financial years across its DStv and GOtv platforms. The stock opened at 58.50 rand, above its reference price based on London-traded shares, before settling.

While the listing hands South African investors rand-denominated exposure to a combined entity serving 42 million subscribers across 70 countries, the operational challenge facing the group is quite tasking.

MultiChoice ended 2025 with 14.4 million subscribers, down from 14.9 million a year earlier, with revenue sliding 6% to EUR 2.4 B. In South Africa alone, DStv shed 589,000 subscribers in the 2025 financial year, an 8% decline across every pricing tier from premium to mass-market.

Sports as a shield

Canal+ has moved decisively to lock in premium rights across multiple disciplines in a bid to stem churn. On Wednesday, the same day as the JSE listing, the group extended its Premier Soccer League broadcast rights through SuperSport across sub-Saharan Africa. That followed a May renewal of its multi-year domestic rugby rights with the South African Rugby Union, covering all Springbok matches.

SuperSport will also broadcast all 104 matches of the 2026 FIFA World Cup across 27 African nations, a tournament featuring a record 10 African teams.

“The renewal of the domestic broadcast agreement is not just the strengthening of our long-standing partnership,” said Rendani Ramovha, Canal+ director for sports content in English and Portuguese-speaking Africa, following the rugby deal. “It is a victory for DStv viewers and subscribers”.

Canal+ Africa CEO David Mignot said the rugby extension “reaffirms our long-term commitment to local sport,” while the group has also committed EUR 100 M to a turnaround plan that includes hiring more than 1,000 salespeople across African markets and lowering subscriber entry costs.

Content consolidation

The Paris-based group has simultaneously moved to rationalise MultiChoice’s streaming bets, shuttering the loss-making Showmax platform in March after years of heavy investment failed to deliver scale.

By centralising sports rights through SuperSport while cutting standalone streaming overhead, Canal+ is betting that live events, which are less vulnerable to cord-cutting than general entertainment, can anchor a broader content proposition that includes thousands of hours of local African productions.

Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada described the dual London-Johannesburg listing as reinforcing the group’s “ambition to be a bridge between Europe and Africa”. But question marks linger over whether a renewed focus on sports and local content can reverse years of subscriber erosion in a market where the shift to streaming appears structural.

Most financial infrastructure was built in markets where payments already work. Bitnob was built in markets where they don’t.

Bitnob has operated at the intersection of some of the world’s most complex financial environments: markets where businesses navigate currency volatility, limited access to dollars, fragmented payment networks, long settlement timelines, and costly cross-border transactions in their everyday operations.

Today, the company is introducing the next evolution of its infrastructure platform.

Bitnob announced the launch of Bitnob Enterprise, a non-custodial infrastructure stack, alongside the next generation of Bitnob Business, its managed platform for businesses building with modern financial rails.

Together, the two offerings provide businesses with a choice between managed and non-custodial operating models while leveraging the same underlying infrastructure.

“We’ve spent years building infrastructure in environments where financial inefficiency is not an inconvenience but a business risk,” said Bernard Parah, Founder and CEO of Bitnob.

“When your customers deal with currency volatility, delayed settlements, restricted access to global currencies, and expensive cross-border payments, you learn very quickly what matters and what doesn’t. The infrastructure we built to solve those problems is increasingly relevant far beyond the markets where we started.”

Over the last five years, Bitnob has built infrastructure powering wallets-as-a-service, payments, treasury operations, stablecoin settlement, swaps, collections, payouts, and virtual card products used by businesses operating across global markets. Today, more than USD 4.5 B has moved through its infrastructure.

First launched in 2022, Bitnob Business provides businesses with access to managed infrastructure via APIs and dashboards, enabling them to launch and scale financial products without having to manage blockchain infrastructure or internal operational complexity.

The next generation of Bitnob Business introduces a redesigned experience and enhanced infrastructure designed to support growing treasury workflows and operational requirements.

Alongside it, Bitnob Enterprise introduces a non-custodial infrastructure layer for organisations and developers that prefer greater ownership and control over how financial products are built and operated.

Customers using Enterprise retain control of their custody architecture while leveraging Bitnob’s infrastructure for wallets, payments, treasury operations, market intelligence, and embedded financial services. It is available to regulated financial institutions, fintechs, and developers building products that prefer a non-custodial architecture from day one.

The launch comes at a time when businesses across emerging markets are increasingly turning to stablecoin infrastructure to move money more efficiently across borders.

According to a 2025 Oui Capital report, Africa’s cross-border payments corridor is projected to grow from approximately USD 329 B annually today to nearly USD 1 T by 2035. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, stablecoins now account for roughly 43% of digital asset transaction activity, driven increasingly by practical use cases such as supplier payments, treasury management, payroll, and international commerce.

At the same time, institutional adoption continues to accelerate globally. Stablecoin frameworks are emerging across major jurisdictions, financial institutions are increasing participation, and programmable financial infrastructure is becoming an increasingly important part of the global financial system.

Bitnob believes the future of financial infrastructure will be shaped not by geography, but by utility. As businesses become increasingly global from day one, the demand for infrastructure that is programmable, borderless, and accessible continues to grow.

The same infrastructure that helps a business in Lagos access global markets can help a company in São Paulo manage treasury more efficiently, or enable a fintech company in Nairobi to move money across borders faster and at lower cost.

Bitnob Business and Bitnob Enterprise are available free beginning today. For more information, visit https://bitnob.com/ or schedule a call with the sales team

For more than a decade, Kenyan freelancers and remote workers built their livelihoods around PayPal. Now, many of them are locked out of their accounts, with funds frozen and no clear path to access their earnings.

The crisis exploded this week after PayPal began restricting and permanently blocking several Kenyan accounts, citing anti-money laundering compliance and fraud prevention obligations. The company required proof of identity, a physical address, and government-issued identification, along with utility bills, contracts or agreements for freelance work, invoices, and bank statements. The requirements proved impossible for many Kenyans.

One freelance writer said he has been unable to access USD 190.00 (about KES 24.5 K) paid by a client in the United Kingdom after PayPal flagged the transaction. “We have chosen to permanently limit your account following a review, thus you are no longer able to use PayPal,” the company informed him.

The crackdown follows Kenya’s placement on the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) grey list of countries considered at increased risk for money laundering and terrorist financing. Enhanced due diligence is now mandatory for all grey-listed counterparties, prompting international payment providers to adopt stricter verification measures. But for affected freelancers, the explanation offers little comfort.

Affected users include freelancers, online sellers, small businesses, artists, and people receiving donations or family support.

One of the most challenging requirements has been proving a physical address. PayPal demands formal documentation such as electricity, water, gas, or internet bills linked to a formally registered residential address. This is not always straightforward in Kenya as many homes are identified by landmarks and informal descriptions, not the structured street addressing common in the United States and Europe.

Accounts that remain non-compliant for more than six months are permanently deactivated without wiring the cash back to the sender. For users whose accounts have already been blocked, balances can be held for up to 180 days, making the platform an increasingly unreliable option for those who depend on timely access to their earnings.

The situation is eerily familiar to Nigerians, who have a painful history with the global payments giant. In 2004, PayPal restricted Nigerian accounts to “send only” status, citing fraud concerns, locking an entire generation of digital entrepreneurs out of receiving international payments. When PayPal partnered with local fintech Paga in January 2026 to finally enable inbound payments, many greeted the news with anger.

“Don’t use it!” one Nigerian user posted on X. “They seized our people’s money for years and stigmatised us as fraudsters. We have better local platforms that do it faster and cheaper”.

Many Nigerians lost thousands of dollars over two decades of account freezes and withheld funds. Sceptics warn that PayPal’s return does not erase the past. A Nigerian user whose account was locked immediately after receiving a one-dollar test payment after the Paga partnership remains blocked.

Across both countries, PayPal’s automated systems have been accused of flagging legitimate African users as suspicious, and demanding documents that ignore how people actually live and work on the continent.

Direct withdrawal from PayPal to M-PESA, as an alternative, has long been available to Kenyans, but that does not solve account freezes. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) now offers instant local-currency transfers across African borders, bypassing correspondent banking chains. Other fintechs like Flutterwave, Paystack and Grey have filled the gap PayPal left behind.

But for many Kenyans who have seen their earnings held hostage by compliance paperwork they cannot produce, none of that helps right now.

When a Techpoint Africa investigation revealed in May that a fictitious restaurant could be set up and take live orders on both Glovo and Chowdeck without any real identity check, it laid bare a deeper crisis of trust in Nigeria’s USD 1.1 B online food delivery industry, and triggered an urgent response from one of its biggest players.

The controversy, which followed a December 2025 complaint by a legitimate food brand that had been impersonated on Glovo, prompted Chowdeck to overhaul its vendor verification framework. Today, the company rolled out a three-tier “Vendor Badge” system designed to give customers clarity about who is actually preparing their food.

“We built Chowdeck on trust,” founder Femi Aluko said in a statement. “A recent incident exposed a vulnerability in a system we created to support small businesses. It raised important questions about customer safety and how vendor verification works.”

Under the new system, “Verified” badges designate fully vetted official partners. “Awaiting Verification” badges apply to starter businesses completing their paperwork, while “Shopper” badges indicate a local store that is fulfilling orders through a trained Chowdeck shopper rather than a direct partnership. The platform’s official blog stressed that compliance does not end at onboarding, promising continuous monitoring and enforcement.

Yet for vendors whose businesses are being listed without their knowledge or consent, the badges do not resolve the core grievance.

A complaint shared publicly on May 28, seen by WT, detailed the frustration of yet another food business, an outlet called Norma known for its suya, which discovered an unauthorised listing on Chowdeck and struggled to have it removed. In the company’s official blog, it wrote that “we take unauthorised listings seriously and will investigate and resolve them promptly.”

Nigeria’s digital commerce ecosystem is steadily expanding, and the federal government has already announced a National Digital Trust Mark to combat online fraud. Industry observers have pointed out that weaker merchant verification on food delivery platforms can lead to consequences ranging from counterfeit goods to health risks.

Chowdeck’s introduction of transparent badges is a calculated step toward rebuilding consumer faith. But as Aluko acknowledged, “trust guides every decision we make.” Whether the badges can restore that trust, and protect the real businesses that are its engine, is now the question the industry is watching.