👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Optasia takes interest in banks

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After a spell servicing telecoms and their mobile money arms, including MTN MoMo, the profitable lending-as-a-service fintech, Optasia, which went public in 2025, said it wants to turn its attention to banks. In an interview with local publication TechCentral, CEO Salvador Anglada said that the company wants to bring its credit-vetting systems to banks because he thinks “they cannot do so themselves.”

Between the lines: Banks across Africa’s biggest markets are still wrestling with bad loans in high-value retail segments. Nigeria’s banking non-performing loan (NPL) ratio climbed back to about 7%, above the prudential ceiling, after regulators ended post-pandemic forbearance; Kenya’s system-wide NPL ratio eased to 15.5% in February, but remains high; and South African lenders have warned that credit losses remain elevated for stressed households and SMEs. Optasia, with its AI-driven technology, is basically promising banks better underwriting for thin-file and lower-income customers that banks have either priced expensively or avoided.

State of play: While this is not Optasia’s first foray into the banking sector, it is making this its beachhead. The company’s reported blended default rate in 2025 climbed by 30 basis points (bps) to 1.2%, with the company saying the rise is “an expected consequence of Optasia’s microfinancing business overtaking its airtime advance business as the company’s largest revenue generator.” 

That shift matters: Microloans are riskier than airtime advances, so holding defaults near 1% while ramping higher-yield credit is the core of the pitch it now wants to sell to banks. On that record, Optasia looks poised to offer a sharper, more data-rich credit decisioning layer to banks that struggle to lend profitably at the bottom of the pyramid, though the real test will be how its models perform through a full credit cycle.

Then, as expected, its shareholder FirstRand, one of South Africa’s largest banking groups, will be the first to plug into this plumbing, via FNB’s revamped eWallet and other products, just as we predicted in 2025. Optasia could ride on FirstRand’s scale and influence to pitch its AI-based technology to other banks in South Africa.

When Access Bank, a Nigerian tier-1 bank, acquired the National Bank of Kenya (NBK), a mid-tier lender formerly owned by KCB, in May 2025, the latter was a struggling business recovering from a loss. However, NBK seems to have repaid that faith and turned a profit in its full-year results ending December 31, 2025. 

The event is remarkable because NBK more than doubled its profitability at the bank level, with profit after tax rising to KES 2.23 billion ($17.2 million) in 2025 from KES 993 million ($7.7 million) in 2024. Group profit after tax also improved, climbing to KES 2.39 billion ($18.4 million) from KES 1.06 billion ($8.1 million) the previous year.

The slow unravelling of NBK: After a steady run in the early 2010s, NBK ran into trouble around 2015 when bad loans started to sour. In that year, a KES 3.72 billion ($28.6 million) loan loss provision produced a pre-tax loss of KES 1.64 billion ($12.6 million). 

By 2023, the clean‑up was still unfinished: NBK reported a KES 3.49 billion ($26.9 million) pre‑tax loss and carried a heavy non‑performing loan book.

By the time KCB Group, another bank, took over in 2019 through a share swap, NBK was in repair mode. This takeover helped stabilise NBK, but it didn’t fully rescue it. Losses still persisted, including a rough 2023 that saw the worst recorded loss in its history, which ultimately set up the sale to Access.

Access the saviour? NBK became profitable in 2024 after its initial loss, but what the results show is that Access has tightened the bank’s operations. In 2025, total operating expenses fell by about 14% to KES 9.97 billion ($77 million) as NBK cut back on ‘other operating expenses’ and rent, even though staff, depreciation, and amortisation costs edged higher; its gross bad loans and advances shrank significantly. 

NBK’s impairment charges on loans also declined by 37%, and its loan book shrank by about a third as Access pulled back from risky lending. Net customer loans fell from KES 74.9 billion ($577.5 million) in 2024 to KES 50.7 billion ($391 million) in 2025.

Is this shaping up to be a good buy? So far, it looks like Access bought the bank at its lowest and stabilised it fast. NBK’s capital ratios have also improved, with core capital‑to‑deposits climbing from 9.0% in 2024 to 11.5% in 2025, and total capital‑to‑risk‑weighted assets rising from 34.4% to 65.3%, giving Access more loss‑absorption room than KCB ever had.

But this is still phase one. KCB’s era saw uneven profits and losses. For this to become a truly strong acquisition, Access has to prove it can now grow a smaller, cleaner loan book and deliver stable earnings year in, year out.

The Communications Regulatory Authority of Namibia (CRAN), the country’s telecoms regulator, has rejected Starlink’s application for a telecom licence and access to radio spectrum. While CRAN said it would issue a statement later, and there is a 90‑day window to revisit the decision, for Starlink, which has been steadily expanding across Africa, it’s a no for now. 

The regulator did not specify a reason for the licence rejection, but Starlink will be sitting puppy-eyed, hoping the regulator overturns the decision within 90 days.

Catch up: Starlink’s planned entry into Namibia began in 2024, when it met with President Nangolo Mbumba to discuss possible investments in the country. Since then, its motive has been viewed suspiciously, with economic analysts, Mally Likukela and Josef Kefas Sheehama saying it would threaten competition in Namibia’s telecom market. In November 2024, CRAN issued a cease-and-desist, saying Starlink was operating without a licence and warned consumers against using its kits.

Open to telecoms sector expansion, just not this one: Namibia’s regulator has recently publicly supported expanding the country’s telecoms sector, even stating that the market can accommodate more players. 

Its mobile data prices sit somewhere in the regional middle, with 1GB of data averaging around $1.2 in 2023, higher than in cheap‑data markets like Nigeria or Ghana but far below the most expensive countries in Africa. 

In African markets where Starlink is already live—from Kenya and Mozambique to Zambia, Malawi, Liberia, and others—standard residential subscriptions typically range from about $30 to $50 a month, with hardware kits often priced above $200, putting the service firmly in premium territory relative to what most people spend on mobile data.

That helps explain the regulator’s caution. Starlink is not a cheap retail substitute for mobile data; it is a high‑capacity satellite pipe that can make sense for businesses, farms, schools, and Internet service providers (ISPs) that sit far from fibre, but it also hands a lot of pricing power to one foreign operator in a small market. While Namibia says it wants more competition, it may not want a player whose model could pull profitable, high‑value customers off local networks while leaving incumbents to serve everyone else.

Starlink problem or industry pattern? Starlink has faced regulatory friction in multiple African markets, most notably South Africa, where licencing remains stuck in policy debates. Yet, the satellite Internet company successfully entered the Central African Republic in December 2025 and Senegal in February 2026, revealing how regulators are split about the technology’s role in their local telecoms markets and broader economies. 

Today, Starlink is available in 26 African countries, but Namibia’s pushback is a reminder that not every regulator wants the same kind of disruption at the same time.

Circle, the US company that issues the USDC dollar stablecoin, has picked Africa for its first deal with Cassava Technologies, a pan-African digital infrastructure group backed by US chipmaker Nvidia. 

State of play: Clients of Cassava’s Sasai Fintech unit, which runs a money-transfer and mobile wallet app across 30 African markets, will soon be able to make local and cross‑border payments in USDC instead of relying only on banks, cash, or traditional remittance firms.

Between the lines: This matters if you earn or pay in shaky local currencies, send money across borders, or run a small business trading in dollars. Stablecoins already sit on critical usage mass globally; the market is worth over $310 billion, and African users have been some of the fastest adopters, using dollar‑backed tokens to dodge currency devaluations, forex (FX) shortages, and high remittance fees. Sasai can become a “dollar wallet in your phone” that moves money faster and often cheaper than bank wires, while giving traders and households a way to park value in a currency that does not swing as violently as the naira, cedi, or kwacha.

For Circle, whose USDC has grown into one of the world’s main payment stablecoins, this is a way to plug straight into Africa’s mobile‑first rails instead of trying to build distribution from scratch. For Cassava, it turns its fintech arm into a bridge between African users and on‑chain dollars.

Written by: Emmanuel Nwosu and Opeyemi Kareem

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu