mobile-money
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Yas Madagascar’s $100 Million Bet Came Before the New Name
Before Telma became Yas, it committed $100 million to a mobile network expansion and brought commercial 5G to Madagascar. The next test is getting that infrastructure to earn its place in everyday life.
Orange found its next act in your wallet
The French telecom group is turning mobile connections into payments, cloud contracts and security services. Its African growth - and European banking retreat - reveal where that ambition earns its keep.
Vodafone Fiji put a wallet inside the phone business
M-PAiSA moved more than FJ$6 billion in a year. Behind that number is a locally owned telecom making itself useful at the checkout, on the bus and far beyond the mobile mast.
Comviva makes the money move. Other brands get the credit.
From a failed flower order to a mobile wallet in Oman, Comviva works behind the brands people recognize. Its business is making payments, telecom services and customer systems work together.
InTouch Wants Africa’s Payments to Meet at One Counter
A Dakar shopkeeper’s tangle of payment services became a business spanning 27 African countries. InTouch’s bet is that the shop counter still matters, even when the money moves online.
Alexandre Liege Is Building the Pipes Behind Africa’s Next Credit Market
After a career moving money through mobile networks, Mastercard and fintech, the Cauris co-founder is applying an operator’s eye to private credit - one repayment, covenant and data feed at a time.
Vendy
Vendy is a Lagos-founded payment infrastructure company that lets businesses accept payments inside the places people already chat - WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram and AI assistants. Sellers spin up a shop in minutes with a catalog, cart, automated invoicing and checkout, and buyers pay without downloading an app or signing up. Started in Y Combinator's W22 batch, Vendy now positions itself as 'agentic payments infrastructure,' offering a single API across cards, bank transfers, mobile money and USSD, and reports more than 20 million transactions processed for around 2,000 merchants.
Taptap Send
Taptap Send is a mobile-first remittance app that lets migrants and diaspora communities send money home to Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean quickly and at low cost. Founded in 2018 by Michael Faye and Paul Niehaus - the team behind GiveDirectly and Segovia - the app charges no explicit transfer fee on most corridors, earning instead through a transparent exchange-rate margin, and delivers roughly 95% of payments within three minutes to bank accounts, mobile-money wallets and cash-pickup points across 70+ destination countries.
Angaza
Angaza is a San Francisco- and Nairobi-based software company whose pay-as-you-go platform lets last-mile distributors sell solar home systems, water pumps, smartphones and other life-changing products to off-grid consumers on small, mobile-money installments. Its cloud platform powers more than 200 distributors across roughly 50 countries.
Lesley Marincola
Lesley Silverthorn Marincola is the founder and CEO of Angaza, a San Francisco-based B2B software company that powers pay-as-you-go financing for solar home systems and other off-grid products across emerging markets. A Stanford-trained product designer and mechanical engineer, she launched Angaza in 2010 after a course called 'Designing for Extreme Poverty' lit a fire she hasn't put out since. Today, Angaza's platform reaches over 5 million people across 50 countries, enabling low-income households to pay for life-changing energy products through weekly micropayments via mobile money — replacing kerosene lamps one $1 payment at a time. Her work earned Angaza the 2018 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and a TED stage appearance. She is a Forbes '30 Under 30' alum, Echoing Green Fellow, and World Economic Forum Young Global Shaper.