👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – MTN’s AI cables

Good morning

Happy Monday. A moment of silence for the dearly departed weekend. It’s a new week to lock in and bring shareholder value. Let’s dive in.

—Zia

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has signed a partnership with the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private-sector investment arm of the World Bank Group, to support the creation of the Kinshasa Stock Exchange, which would become the country’s first stock market. A stock exchange allows businesses or the government to raise money beyond traditional bank loans and development finance.

Who is supposed to list on this exchange? A stock exchange is only as interesting as the companies on it. Some African countries have struggled with limited listings and low trading activity, including Kenya, which had an 11-year initial public offering (IPO) drought on its exchange. While South Africa’s Johannesburg Stock Exchange has spent recent years battling a stream of delistings, the DRC will need enough businesses willing and able to meet the governance and reporting standards required of public companies.

Before anyone starts ringing any opening bells, there is still work to do. A bill that would create the legal framework for the DRC’s financial markets is still making its way through the Senate. A functioning exchange needs laws, regulators, settlement systems, depositories, listing requirements, brokers, auditors, and companies willing to disclose their finances to the public. The DRC’s proposed law intends to create that plumbing, including a market regulator, a securities depository, settlement banks, and the legal framework needed for stocks and bonds to trade.

Why this matters: Instead of relying solely on banks or venture capital fundraising, businesses can raise money directly from investors or the public to finance expansion plans or large-scale projects. The DRC is betting that a domestic exchange could attract both local and international capital into the country.

WapiPay, a Nairobi-founded fintech, hassecured a Money Services Business (MSB) licence from Canada’s Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre (FINTRAC), giving it its first regulated North American hub for foreign exchange, money transfers, payments, and virtual currency transactions.

Another licence in the bag: The licence is the latest in a deliberate run of regulatory wins. In February, WapiPaylaunched a Remittance Credit Score tool helping Kenyan banks use diaspora remittance flows to assess borrowers with no formal credit history. In April, itentered Jamaica through a partnership with JN Money Services, opening Africa-Asia-Caribbean payment corridors. Canada is the third regulated market in three months.

How did we get here: Founded in 2019 by twins Eddie and Paul Ndichu, WapiPay initially focused on payments between Africa and Asia, targeting Kenyan importers paying Chinese suppliers through a slow, expensive banking system. In its first 18 months after receiving its Kenyan licence, it said it processed $500 million in remittances for over one million customers. Remittances to Kenya surpassed $5 billion in 2025 for the first time, and WapiPay is now positioning itself as the rail connecting multiple corridors in that flow.

What else? The Canadian licence also covers virtual currency and digital asset transactions, quietly future-proofing WapiPay for a world where stablecoins become a standard settlement layer. Given that Tether, the fintech that issues the Tether stablecoin (USDT), recently invested in LemFi, the remittance fintech, for exactly that reason, the timing is not accidental.

In 2018, Zimbabwe’s central bank cut cryptocurrency businesses off from the banking system by directing financial institutions to stop facilitating cryptocurrency transactions. Exchanges and crypto firms have been unable to operate legally, but crypto trading activity moved underground to peer-to-peer channels and informal networks. This is about to change. 

What has happened now? Zimbabwe has introduced a new registration framework for cryptocurrency companies, requiring businesses that buy, sell, transfer, or safeguard digital assets to register with the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), the country’s anti-money-laundering agency. Under the new rules, crypto companies will pay a registration fee and renew their licences annually, while operating without approval could attract penalties.

Could it be an African thing? Crypto arrives, operates in a regulatory grey area, gets threatened with restrictions or outright banned, and then gets regulated. This has played out across other African countries, including Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya. Nigeria moved from restricting banks’ involvement in crypto transactions to creating licensing frameworks for digital asset companies. South Africa now requires crypto firms to obtain licences from financial regulators, and Kenya is also advancing legislation to regulate Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) after years of operating without a dedicated framework.

Why it matters: Cryptocurrency conversations in Africa are now shifting towards oversight and regulations rather than restrictions. Governments are recognising that crypto has become too large and too useful to too many people to remain entirely outside the financial system or in a grey area.

Every time someone digs illegally near an MTN fibre cable in South Africa, the cable now hears it coming. MTN isdeploying fibre-cut sensing technology that turns its underground cables into sensors, detecting micro-vibrations from digging activity before a spade actually severs the line. 

The goal is to collapse repair windows that currently run eight hours or more. Alongside this,autonomous network agents are triaging network incidents in South Africa and adjusting parameters automatically, with human approval required before changes go live.

The bigger picture: This is one piece of MTN’s Capital Markets Day AI strategy. MTN is targeting R30 billion ($1.8 billion) in AI value creation over the next three to five years, using AI to run MTN itself, as the most confident near-term bet. Network and IT operations account for roughly 55% of MTN’s operating expenses and nearly 80% of its capital expenditure, making every efficiency gain here financially significant at scale. 

What this means in practice: Nigeria is the most advanced deployment market. MTN Nigeria has replaced over 200 SIM registration employees with 13 AI agents using computer vision, and the same AI infrastructure is being used to detect fibre cuts and automate fault management. MTN also plans to install GPUs at base stations across Africa, converting its tower estate into a distributed AI inference grid, so the same hardware runs both the cellular network and edge AI workloads simultaneously.