Tech Top 5 News
MTN Group is in talks to take over the South African telephony group, Telkom.
It made it known to its Shareholders that the discussions were to acquire Telkom’s entire issued share capital in return for shares or a combination of cash and shares.
In a statement released on Friday, MTN said discussions are at an early stage, and there is no certainty that the transaction will be consummated.
“The transaction, if concluded, may have a material effect on the price of the company’s securities. Accordingly, shareholders are advised to exercise caution when dealing in the company’s securities until a further announcement is made,” MTN said.
Telkom confirmed the discussions in a separate statement issued to shareholders.
The deal will face intense scrutiny from the Competition Commission and other regulators, given the size of the two companies and their dominance in the sector.
MTN currently has 34.5 million subscribers, making it the second largest mobile operator behind Vodacom. Telkom has 16.9 million mobile subscribers.
Bloc Acquires Orchestrate to Offer Fintech Infrastructure Services
Bloc has announced the acquisition of Getwallets, the wallets-as-a-service provider that recently changed to a payment orchestration company, Orchestrate.
Orchestrate is set to power Bloc’s payment infrastructure.
The strategic acquisition will enable Bloc to focus its core product strategy on delivering seamless BaaS & banking services while orchestrate leads its fintech Infrastructure with its proprietary payments orchestration API.
Its rise to a broader payments infrastructure company means, as Orchestrate, it can provide businesses instant access to multiple payment methods and providers globally through a single integration (currently available in Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt, South Africa and the USA, with plans to extend support to more foreign payment providers and currencies shortly).
Bloc’s acquisition of Orchestrate boosts the group’s capacity to offer FinTech infrastructure such as online payments, subscription management, BNPL payment infrastructure, virtual wallets, bill payments, invoicing, in its fintech-as-a-service suite of APIs.
Commenting on the acquisition, the founder of Bloc, Edmund Olotu, said, “We are proud of our input in helping shape the African fintech space and excited to welcome the Orchestrate team into the Bloc family. Part of our vision has always been to empower businesses of all sizes to offer seamless payment solutions to their customers, which is essential not just to the experience of the end user but also to the sector’s growth. his is an exciting evolution for both businesses as we look to grow and build even more solutions that ultimately support the growth of African tech businesses in the coming years.’’
Founder and CEO of Orchestrate, Jerry Enebeli, added, “We are thrilled to bring our technology and know-how to the already incredible Bloc team. It was clear that our business growth goals aligned and that we could mutually benefit from combining our talent, resources, and expertise to create a unique infrastructure that can power African fintech.We are looking forward to working together to close the fragmented gaps in cross-platform payments and powering many more businesses to scale their markets, whether in Africa or globally.”
Flutterwave Suspends Virtual Dollar Cards
Flutterwave said its virtual dollar cards would be unavailable for any transactions and purchases from Sunday, 17th July 2022.
The cards have been a convenient way for Nigerian merchants to convert their naira balance into US dollars on a virtual Mastercard to make online payments.
However, announcing the service suspension on Virtual Dollar Card, Flutterwave said, “We are writing to inform you that effective Sunday, 17th July 2022, all our Virtual Dollar Cards will be unavailable for any transactions and purchases. This is due to an update from our card partner, which will cause the card service to be unavailable for an extended period. You will be unable to make online and in-store payments and purchases using your Virtual Dollar Card(s), you will be unable to fund existing Virtual Dollar Card(s), your existing Virtual Dollar Card(s) will be terminated, and the corresponding balance will be credited to your payment balance.”
While it is working with its card partner to restore the service as soon as possible, Flutterwave advised its customers to unlink their dollar card(s) from recurring payments and replace them with another payment method.
The Barter card is used on most merchant sites where the MasterCard logo is displayed. The Barter USD card can be used on most global payment sites like Uber, Google Play, Apple Music, Facebook, PayPal, etc. for payments and purchases.
Meta builds AI that can translate 55 African languages
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, says it has built the first open-source single artificial intelligence (AI) machine that can translate across 200 languages, including 55 African languages, with state-of-the-art results.
The company said it is using the modelling techniques and learnings from project ‘No Language Left Behind’ NLLB-200 to improve and extend translations on Facebook, Instagram, and Wikipedia.
The company is said to develop high-quality machine translation capabilities for most of the world’s low-resource languages. This single AI model was designed with a focus on African languages. They are challenging from a machine translation perspective.
In a Facebook post, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said they worked with professional translators for each of these languages to develop a reliable benchmark that can automatically assess translation quality for many low-resource languages.
“To give a sense of the scale, the 200-language model has over 50 billion parameters, and we trained it using our new Research SuperCluster, which is one of the world’s fastest AI supercomputers. The advances here will enable more than 25 billion translations every day across our apps,” he said.
Zuckerberg added, “Communicating across languages is one superpower that AI provides, but as we keep advancing our AI work, it’s improving everything we do from showing the most interesting content on Facebook and Instagram to recommending more relevant ads, to keeping our services safe for everyone.”
According to him, AI models require lots of data to help them learn, and there’s not a lot of human-translated training data for these languages.
“There are more than 20 million people who speak and write in Luganda, but examples of this written language are extremely difficult to find on the internet,” he concluded.
Sendsprint Launches, Provides Money Transfers to Africans in Diaspora
SendSprint, a payments and money transfer startup, launched yesterday in the UK with a service targeting Africans in the diaspora.
SendSprint’s product offering is enabled through a strategic partnership with Flutterwave to facilitate cross-border remittances for transactions coming into Africa.
SendSprint established the UK as its international headquarters with a presence in the US and Nigeria. It has also applied for the necessary licensing through a regulated entity.
The fintech is launching two products to connect the African diaspora to loved ones at home. The first is Send money, which enables seamless transfers into African countries, and the other is Sprint Connect, a gifting solution that connects the African diaspora to retailers across the continent.
They are also offering three destination countries for senders, including Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, and in the first 18 months, they are targeting 300,000 UK customers.
SendSprint’s Money Transfer product will offer a flat fee of $5 for international transfers into Africa and favourable exchange rates with real-time transaction monitoring and 24/7 customer service support.
Tech Personality of The Week
Tayo Oviosu
This week’s tech personality is Tayo Oviosu. He is the founder and Group CEO of Paga Group Ltd.
Paga is a finance company focused on solving problems prevalent in the Nigerian financial industry, including making money more accessible and portable via mobile payment systems.
They also offer their platform as a service to third-party partners.
Recognised globally in 2014, CNBC selected Tayo as the ‘Entrepreneur of the Year West Africa’, and in 2015 the African Leadership Network selected Paga as the outstanding growing company of the year in Africa.
In 2021, paga’s total payment value was N1.2 trillion.
Oviosu is also the co-founder of Kairos Angels, an angel investment company.
Kairos Angels is on a mission to transform the world by partnering with visionary entrepreneurs to build scalable and sustainable businesses.
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