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Summary of the news

• OPay and MoniePoint dominate Nigeria’s agency banking
• Sam Bankman-Fried's bid to have criminal charges against him thrown out has been rejected
• Twitter has increased the character count for a tweet to 25,000 for paid users
• Tayo Oviosu has rejected an opportunity to partner with English football club, Arsenal.

Ecosystem

• OPay (563,262) and MoniePoint (303,946) dominate Nigeria’s agency banking, controlling 57.8% of 1.5 million POS agents. Lagos alone has 322,266 out of the 1.5 million agents. This represents 21.4% of all POS agents in the country, leaving the other 35 states and Abuja to share the remainder. A significant portion of Nigerians, 50.3%, utilise a banking agent, be it a mobile money or POS agent, for receiving funds. Additionally, 44.4% of Nigerians rely on these agents to send money, while 2.9% utilise their services to pay bills.
• The Group CEO of Nigerian mobile payment company, Paga, Tayo Oviosu, has rejected an opportunity to partner with English football club, Arsenal. In a tweet shared by the CEO, Arsenal appeared to have approached Oviosu with a partnership proposal for Paga. In the proposal, the club promised to help Paga leverage its global reach and transform lives through financial access.
• inDrive is launching its ride-hailing service in Ibadan this June. Timothy Oladimeji, Business Development Representative at inDrive, Nigeria, says that this is an excellent time to extend the ride-hailing service to Ibadan. “The recent driver strikes suggest that there is a need for an alternative approach to ride-hailing. That’s where we come in; our model allows drivers and passengers to negotiate a fair price, rather than having an algorithm dictate this. We believe this offers a viable solution to many of the problems facing ride-hailing in Nigeria at present.”

Policy

• Digital creators in Kenya will now pay a 5% withholding tax on the income gotten from various means including content monetisation on social media platforms, brand sponsorships, and affiliate marketing. Additionally, transactions using digital assets like cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) will be charged a 3% tax.
• The newly appointed Acting Comptroller-General (C-G) of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), Adewale Adeniyi, has expressed his commitment to running a highly technologically-driven organisation in line with global best practices. Adeniyi acknowledged the impact of e-commerce, global supply chains, and transnational criminal networks, and stressed the importance of adapting to changing landscapes through the use of technology, intelligence-led operations, and effective risk management strategies.

Social Tech

• Meta has announced that WhatsApp Business has reached 200 million monthly active users. This was up from 50 million users gathered in 2020, just two years after its 2018 launch. The current numbers represent a 300% growth rate in the three years in between, indicating that WhatsApp Business has continued to grow quite quickly.
• Only 17% of Nigerian Tiktok users actively use the platform for consuming news content. Comparatively, South Africa boasts a higher percentage, 22%, while in Kenya, 29% of users turn to TikTok as a source of news content. In Africa, the majority of Kenyans, specifically 63% of the population, place their trust in most news sources most of the time. Similarly, in Nigeria, a significant percentage of the population, 57%, exhibits a similar level of trust in most news sources most of the time. The report states that the preference for initiating news journeys through a website or app has decreased by 10 percentage points since 2018.
• Social media app IRL—an acronym for “in real life”—is shutting down after discovering that most of the 20 million users it boasted were anything but real. An internal investigation by the company’s board of directors found more than 95% of the accounts on the six-year-old company were “automated or from bots,” as The Information first reported.
• TikTok is introducing a new way for creators to earn money on its platform. The company announced that it’s launching the “TikTok Creative Challenge,” a new monetisation feature that allows creators submit video ads to brand challenges and receive money based on video performance. TikTok Creative Challenge is currently in testing with select brands. To be eligible for the new feature, creators must be at least 18 years old and have a US-based account with a minimum of 50,000 followers. Once enrolled in the TikTok Creative Challenge, creators will be able to browse through a list of challenges and view the reward pool, additional details, and requirements.
• Twitter has increased the character count for a tweet to 25,000 for paid users. An engineer at Twitter, Prachi Poddar, also announced the change by posting a long tweet last week. In February, Twitter increased the limit to 4,000 characters, later extending it to 10,000 characters in April. At that time, the company also introduced support for text formatting features like bold and italic.

Global News

• A U.S. judge has denied Sam Bankman-Fried's bid to have criminal charges against him thrown out, paving the way for the founder of now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX to face trial starting Oct. 2. Prosecutors accused Bankman-Fried of stealing billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to plug losses at his Alameda Research hedge fund. They also accused Bankman-Fried of misleading investors and lenders and contributing illegally to U.S. political campaigns in the names of colleagues. Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty and denied stealing funds while acknowledging that FTX had inadequate risk management.
• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told fellow executives and board members last year that the software company aims to reach $500 billion in revenue by the 2030 fiscal year, more than doubling its current size. The comments, pointing to annual revenue growth of at least 10%, appeared in a memo that became public on Monday as part of Microsoft’s federal court hearing over its pending Activision Blizzard acquisition.

Latest in funding

• ShopZetu raises pre-seed funding to fuel growth of its fashion marketplace beyond Kenya

Other stories we are following

• FTX splashed huge amounts of customers’ funds on non-crypto projects
• Digital sex offenders registry launched in Kenya
• Saudi VMS acquires minority stake in Egyptian Cash Cows to bridge startup ecosystems in MENA
• Binance predicts mainstream crypto adoption in SA