Technext

There is a moment in every Lagos shopping trip that captures something true about Nigeria’s digital payments system. You walk into a store, the cashier swipes your card on a POS machine, and the money leaves your account before you have even finished bagging your items. It is instant. It is everywhere. It works. Now try to buy that same item and pay for it over three months, using a credit card the way someone in London, Nairobi, or Dubai might. You probably cannot.

Daya, a Nairobi-based fintech building payment and treasury infrastructure for African businesses, has raised $2.4 million in a pre-seed round to expand its platform across the continent. The round was led by Hivemind Capital, with participation from Lattice Fund, Alliance, and Aptos. The funding will support Daya’s efforts to reduce the cost and complexity of cross-border money transfers for African businesses, freelancers, and global teams.

For years, the enterprise world has treated the prospect of autonomous, AI-driven cyberattacks as a horizon issue. A theoretical storm brewing just far enough away to justify pushing major infrastructure upgrades into the next budget cycle. That comfort blanket was unceremoniously yanked off this week.

5G connections in Sub-Saharan Africa have been tipped to reach 370 million connections, a 1,133% growth from the current 30 million subscriptions. This is according to an industry report by Ericsson, the Swedish telecoms giant. The projection comes at a time when 5G growth in Africa is still crawling, due to a significant share of mobile connections that rely on 2G/3G.

WeLight, Africa’s biggest solar mini-grid operator, has raised $31 million (€27 million) in fresh funding after the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private-sector lending arm, acquired a stake in the company. The investment, which also includes contributions from WeLight’s founding shareholders, will fund the company’s expansion into Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, two countries with massive populations still lacking reliable access to electricity.

Scammers are taking advantage of the FIFA World Cup 2026, which kicked off on June 11 and runs until July 19. The tournament is the biggest in its history, with 48 teams playing 104 matches across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and the global attention it draws has also attracted fake websites designed to steal money and personal data from fans trying to follow the action.

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A Federal High Court sitting in Abuja has ruled that Guaranty Trust Holding Company Plc (GTCO) violated the privacy and data protection rights of a man who was never its customer, after the company’s subsidiary, Guaranty Trust Fund Managers, sent him repeated promotional text messages he never consented to receive and could not opt out of.

The merger between Providus Bank and Unity Bank is now fully official, with customers already receiving notifications from the newly combined institution, which will operate under the name ProvidusUnity Bank. The Supreme Court dissolved Unity Bank’s board and approved ProvidusUnity Bank as the new name for the merged entity, ending a legal battle that threatened to delay one of Nigeria’s biggest banking consolidations in recent years.

Football podcast listening is growing sharply across Sub-Saharan Africa. New Spotify listening data shows that football podcasts across several markets have seen a dramatic increase in audience in June 2026 compared with the average from January through May. Football fans across the continent appear to be interested in more than live match broadcasts and short highlight clips.