Digital Transformation OP-ED - Whose (fintech) rails are these anyway? Notes from a Hong Kong week of trams, card taps and blueberries A candid dispatch that takes stock of the everyday fintech infrastructure behind Hong Kong's digital transformation, with flags worth minding as (South) Africa builds its own rails.
Venture Capital The Trajectory Africa Distilled #07: The Asset Intensity Question in Digital Commerce The market needs African B2B e-commerce to be asset-heavy, but the venture money was raised for asset-light.
Fintech OP-ED - An engineer and his team of AI agents have a quarrel with your bank card Part three of three on Francois Rautenbach, an engineer using AI to do the work of five while making the case for a way to pay that hangs on proof rather than trust.
Entrepreneurship OP-ED - Companies in pain pay best Part two of three on hardware-software specialist Francois Rautenbach captures his doctrine of the willing customer and follows the trail from a coffee chat at Novell's Utah HQ to the Payment Pebble.
Career OP-ED - He read the software off a Moon-mission computer. Now he's wary of the rush to skip the basics. First in a three-part series on Francois Rautenbach, a South African engineer who has caught every wave of computing from Apollo-era hardware to AI coding agents, and what his career climb says about learning to build when the machine seems to write itself.
Digital Transformation OP-ED - Big Money, done properly? A well-travelled South African chartered accountant with an M&A background reckons he's seen what the African investment scene is missing. His fix for Big Money's blind spots? More Big Money.
Artificial Intelligence OP-ED - The badge says "fully human"... Substack's scanner couldn't see the four AI tools I'd used. New EU rules, a public AI detector and an invisible watermark land in a flurry.
The Trajectory Africa Distilled The Trajectory Africa Distilled #06: Digitalisation, Its Limits, and the Problem of Stuck Money The real(est) African infrastructure gap is money that won't move.
Digital Transformation OP-ED - China's courts already lean on AI. The lawyers are next. A Suits actor is selling a tool upending a profession built on privileged access and scarce expertise. Law is starting to look like the early case rather than the exception.
Artificial Intelligence OP-ED - The space race is a vanity dash. The vault is the prize. A Chinese open-source model wiped a percentage point off the S&P 500. Three weeks earlier, the world's largest hedge fund beat every frontier model it tested with a fine-tuned Alibaba base and its own expert-labelled data. African banks and telcos should take notes.
Digital Transformation OP-ED - Who gets to belong? Narrative, power, and community at Katapult Future Fest 2026 Tayo Akinyemi reports from Katapult Future Fest 2026 on narrative, belonging, and the boundaries of communities seeking to reshape how capital and technology serve people—previewing Capital for Infrastructure, her forthcoming project with Osarumen Osamuyi.
The Trajectory Africa Distilled The Trajectory Africa Distilled #04: Cross-Border Payments—Stablecoins vs. Instant Payment Systems Instant payment systems like the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) offer a state-sanctioned alternative to stablecoins, but face structural constraints that are ultimately political, not technical. Tayo Akinyemi works through the trade-offs.
Fintech POD - Nikolai Barnwell on building PawaPay without the VC machine, and why mobile money beats cards PawaPay CEO Nikolai Barnwell on why payments, not "fintech", is the real problem worth solving, what a decade at 88mph taught him about funding, and why he is betting the continent's rails on mobile money over cards.
Digital Transformation OP-ED - When "lower value human capital" meets the AI bill that costs more than people Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters apologised for the phrase, not the thinking behind it. Meanwhile, the numbers from Microsoft, Uber and Nvidia suggest humans may have been the bargain all along.
Artificial Intelligence OP-ED - When the AI subsidies end, the cheaper option might be human The subsidised AI rates we are all enjoying have a sell-by date. When it arrives, the comparison between an expensive agentic system and a fully-loaded human salary may look rather different.
This Is Connectivity OP-ED - AI tools are taking us somewhere no human has ever been. Just not in your voice. A study involving Google DeepMind researchers and a festival-shortlisted short film surface two persistent anxieties in my journalism practice.
Market Intelligence OP-ED - What really happens between "send" and "received" A Nigerian software engineer on currency volatility, rate buffers, and why transparency beats the "zero fees" promise every time.
Artificial Intelligence OP-ED - AI in Africa's context gap: a PwC partner, a Wits researcher and a Ghanaian founder walk into the same problem A PwC partner says African organisations' AI tools are 'pretty useless' without clean data. A Wits computer scientist explains why. And a Ghanaian AI founder is betting he can close the gap. Part 2 of 2
Market Intelligence POD - Russell Southwood on monopolies, M-Pesa, and candid framings of Africa's digital economy Analyst and author Russell Southwood reflects on a quarter-century of observing Africa's digital transformation. From yellow pages cold calls to fibre-to-the-home rollouts, Southwood makes the case for holding optimism and realism in the same hand.
Digital Transformation OP-ED - The US$140-million (R2.4-billion) reality check PwC’s latest Africa Cloud Business Survey says 98% of African organisations plan to expand their cloud architecture and 37% are implementing agentic AI. A sit-down with the man behind the numbers unearthed qualifications more revealing than the statistics.
Digital Economy OP-ED - When the crowd becomes the mob: prediction markets and the price of 'truth' A journalist threatened over a betting market. Insider trading on military strikes. Billions wagered on geopolitical chaos. The question must be asked: are prediction markets indispensable truth machines or sophisticated casinos with geopolitical consequences.
Social Media OP-ED - X marks the spot: your platform is someone else's country Open-sourcing a candid disagreement with Future in the Humanities (FITH) Founding Chair Prof Iginio Gagliardone about Mastodon and X. What are the tradeoffs of building an African intellectual project on platforms that might extract more than they give?
Digital Transformation OP-ED - What good navigation looks like: no machine sails itself From Block's standing ovation to Monday.com's manifesto to a South African consultancy that started with the social system, Part 3 asks what good AI navigation actually looks like when you prioritise the human element and demand results over rhetoric.
Fintech POD - Seyi Ebenezer on why African startups should stop chasing cheques and start building books Payaza's co-founder and CEO Seyi Ebenezer makes the case for debt over venture capital, explains why credit ratings are the ultimate negotiating weapon for African founders, and passionately advances the idea of a pan-African credit rating agency built by the continent, for the continent.
Digital Transformation OP-ED - The mine, the machine, and the intern From post-WW2 coal mines to modern codebases, history suggests AI transformation will rise or fall not on technical capability alone, but on whether organisations deliberately redesign the social systems that surround the machine.
