👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – One licence, two countries

TGIF.

TechCabal Insights has published a new data brief, Africa’s Climatetech Capital Inflection Point, and the headline finding is striking: Africa’s climatetech startups raised $1.18 billion in 2025, a 57% surge year-on-year, even as deal volume fell for the third consecutive year.

Get the brief today to find out more.

Oluwatobi Busola is the Human Resource Manager at Redtech, the technology company backed by Nigerian billionaire Tony Elumelu’s Heirs Holdings. Redtech helps businesses move money at scale through reliable systems that meet the compliance needs of enterprises and regulated sectors. With nearly a decade of experience across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa, she has scaled HR systems to support rapid growth while embedding culture and performance frameworks that sustain momentum. In a sector obsessed with product and funding headlines, Busola’s work highlights the often invisible infrastructure of people, performance, and organisational design that makes fintech scale possible.

• Explain what you do to a 5-year-old.

I help grown-ups work well together so they can build really important things. It’s like when you and your friends are playing ‘Build a Tower’ with blocks: everyone needs to play a part (one person brings the blocks, one stacks, one keeps it steady). I am the one who helps you agree on the plan and keep it steady, so the tower doesn’t fall.

• You’ve worked across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. What’s one harsh truth about building and retaining talent in Africa that most companies don’t want to admit?

A lot of companies want high-performing talent, but not all of them want to invest in the systems, leadership, and development that make good people stay. You cannot build scale on passion alone. If people do not see growth, clarity, and capable leadership around them, they will leave, no matter how exciting the vision sounds.

• If you could go back to the start of your career, what’s one decision you would make differently knowing what you know now?

I would have started earlier in seeing myself as a business leader, not just an HR professional alone. The sooner you understand the language of the business, the faster you move from supporting growth to actively shaping it. 

Nigeria’s Central Bank (CBN) has decided that if financial crime is getting smarter, the system fighting it should too, so the regulator has updated its anti-money-laundering rules to formally welcome artificial intelligence and machine learning, for the first time ever, into the country’s financial crime toolkit.

What will the AI actually do? Basically, find patterns. AI tools will analyse customer behaviour, like their transaction histories and account activity, to detect anomalies. For example, if an account that typically makes small transfers suddenly initiates large transfers across multiple jurisdictions, the system can flag it. AI can also recognise name variations that traditional systems might miss.

Why the urgency? Fraud is getting expensive. Data from the Financial Institutions Training Centre (FITC) shows fraud losses jumped 603% to ₦3.29 billion ($2.27 million) in the first quarter of 2025. Plus, Nigeria only recently exited the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list, a category reserved for countries with weaknesses in anti-money-laundering controls, in 2025, and it does not want to go back. On top of that, Nigeria’s financial ecosystem has gone fully digital in recent years, and with that has come a rise in sophisticated financial crime tactics.

The ticking compliance clock: Institutions operating in Nigeria’s financial ecosystem must submit implementation roadmaps within three months, showing how they plan to deploy compliant AML systems. Failure to comply could attract penalties, but that has not been disclosed yet. 

For now, sit tight, people, AI is watching.

P.S. Don’t freak out about your data. Banks have long monitored customer activity as part of anti-money-laundering rules, only this time, AI is helping do the watching.

A passport, but for licences: Kenya and Rwanda are working on a project that will fulfil the wish of many fintechs: one licence to rule them all. 

The central banks of both countries have signed an agreement to design a licence passporting framework for payment companies, meaning that if a fintech is licenced in one country, regulators in the other country could recognise that licence instead of forcing the company to start the entire application process again.

The holy alliance: Kenya is seen as East Africa’s payments powerhouse, driven by the success of mobile money platforms like M-PESA, while Rwanda has spent the past decade positioning itself as a regional technology and financial services hub. 

They also happen to be neighbours within the East African Community, where policymakers have been pushing for deeper financial integration, as evidenced by the East African Community Cross Border Payment System Masterplan, which plans to connect payment systems across the region and ease digital transactions between partner states. Creating this ‘master licence’ is one step to achieving this goal.

Kenyan/Rwandan fintechs are probably on cloud nine: Expanding across African markets is rarely straightforward for fintechs, because each country has its own regulators and licencing rules. Because of that, many fintechs avoid applying for new licences and instead acquire companies that already hold one. This has played out across the continent: in 2023, Moniepoint received approval to acquire Kenya’s payments and credit startup, Kopo Kopo. Buying a licenced operator is often faster than waiting for regulatory approval.

A market tougher than nails: This ‘master licence’ approach raises the question of whether a licence in one market automatically unlocks the other. If Kenya and Rwanda eventually recognise each other’s licences, the impact could be huge, competition-wise. Fintechs may find themselves competing with an entire neighbouring ecosystem overnight, which honestly makes the fintech race more interesting.

Zeno, a Kenyan-based cleantech startup, secured $25 million in series A funding. The round includes $20.5 million in equity led by Congruent Ventures, with participation from Active Impact Investments and Lowercarbon Capital, and a $4.5 million debt facility from Camber Road and Trifecta Capital. (Mar 9)

Here are the other deals for the week:

• Cybervergent, a Nigerian cybersecurity startup, raised $3 million in seed funding from Ventures Platform through its Pan-African Fund II and Atlantica Ventures. (Mar 6)
• NjiaPay, a South African fintech startup, raised $2.1 million in seed funding from Newion Partners. (Mar 9)
• Orca Fraud, a South African fintech startup, raised $2.35 million in a seed round led by Norrsken22, with participation from Enza Capital, CV VC Africa, and OneDayYes. (Mar 9)
• Yazi, a South African AI research startup, raised undisclosed funding in a round led by 3 Capital Ventures (3CV). (Mar 10)

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more funding announcements. Before you go, Africa’s startup ecosystem has kicked off 2026 stronger than last year. Find out more here.

Written by: Success Sotonwa, Opeyemi Kareem, and Emmanuel Nwosu

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu & Ganiu Oloruntade