👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – ‘How to raid a bank’

On Tuesday, the Stripe-owned Nigerian fintech reorganised its businesses under a holding company structure called The Stack Group (TSG), a nod to what employees have long called themselves: “The Stacks.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s becoming the standard playbook. As fintechs grow large enough to operate multiple products with different regulatory and commercial needs, they increasingly adopt holding company structures that centralise control while allowing subsidiaries to scale independently.

Moniepoint Inc. operates as the holding company over Moniepoint Microfinance Bank and other units, while Interswitch Group sits above its payments, switching, and digital commerce businesses. More recently, Egypt’s Fawry, one of the continent’s most profitable fintechs, restructured into a holding company in 2025 as it expanded beyond payments.

The creation of The Stack Group followed Paystack’s acquisition of Ladder Microfinance Bank, which gave the fintech company a microfinance licence to operate Paystack MFB.

Why does a holdco structure matter? Operating a holdco allows the company’s businesses to run independently under The Stack Group (TSG) umbrella. Following its venture into consumer payments and microfinance, The Stack Group now controls Paystack (the fintech), Paystack MFB (its microfinance bank), Zap by Paystack (its consumer payments app), and a venture studio, TSG Labs.

Stripe still owns Paystack following its $200 million acquisition in 2020, but this new structure introduces shared ownership between Stripe, Paystack’s CEO, and existing Paystack employees.

Why is the company doing this? Over the past year, Paystack launched Zap and secured a microfinance banking licence. Banking, consumer payments, and investments come with very different regulatory and operational demands. A holding company allows each business to run its own race without tripping the others. If one unit gets fined or slowed by regulation, the rest keep moving.

By putting its businesses under TSG, Paystack can keep its core merchant payments engine focused, while giving newer bets like Zap, Paystack MFB, and TSG Labs the freedom to grow or even fail without dragging the entire company with them. This has worked for other payment companies, and it might just work for Paystack.

Restructuring into a holding company is a signal that Paystack The Stack Group is ushering a more mature phase of its business.

There are no shortcuts in life and business banking. If you doubt us, ask Absa, the tier-1 South African bank with R2.16 trillion ($110 billion) in assets.

Absa is poaching top executives from competitor Standard Bank, South Africa’s largest bank by assets. This week, Absa’s investment-banking unit appointed the head of client coverage for the same division at Standard Bank as managing executive for client coverage. The head of legal at Standard Bank will also join the Absa team as the deputy general group counsel.

In 2025, Absa hired multiple senior leaders from Standard Bank, including its current Group CEO, Kenny Fihla, who previously served as deputy CEO at Standard Bank and ran its Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) division. Under Fihla, Absa has poached other former Standard Bank executives to key roles in CIB and group risk, as part of a broader turnaround and pan‑African growth strategy.

This has intentionality written all over it: In October 2025, Absa’s Ugandan subsidiary acquired Standard Chartered Bank Uganda’s Wealth and Retail Banking (WRB) business, which will see the transfer of all its clients and staff to Absa. And now, it’s cherry-picking off executives from Standard Bank’s South African branch.

Why would two top banks be exchanging senior talent?

When people with decades at one institution decide to move together, it’s rarely about money alone. Absa’s smaller size makes it appear like a bank in rebuild-and-attack mode. Senior leaders with deep institutional memory are choosing to jump ship from Africa’s biggest bank (Standard Bank) to a smaller rival that suddenly feels more energetic or feels like a place where they can make a faster impact.

When it comes to business magnitude, however, Standard Bank still dwarfs Absa, with about $195 billion in assets compared to Absa’s $110 billion. Absa is still smaller than Standard Bank, but right now, it looks hungrier, and talent—experienced executives who’ve seen it all at the top level—can sense that.

When your internet stops working, you complain. But when your money stops working, you walk across a border.

That is what is playing out in Eastern Uganda, where residents are crossing into Kenya to access cash after Uganda’s post-election restrictions kept mobile money services offline, even as broader internet access was restored. In border towns like Busia, users are transferring funds from Ugandan MTN and Airtel wallets into Kenyan platforms such as M-PESA, withdrawing Kenyan shillings, and converting them back into Ugandan currency to keep daily life moving.

We saw a similar workaround play out when Tanzania restricted the internet during elections in October 2025. The stowaway process is keeping households afloat, but it is hollowing out Uganda’s local economy. Mobile money agents, small traders, and transport operators who depend on high-volume, low-value transactions are losing daily income, while Kenyan agents quietly pick up the spillover. Telecoms say their hands are tied, pointing to regulatory directives with no clear timeline for full restoration.

Uganda’s communications regulator has framed the shutdown as a security measure tied to elections, citing misinformation risks and public order concerns. But mobile money in Uganda, with over 33 million subscribers, is not social media. It is infrastructure. It underpins transport fares, food purchases, school fees, and micro-business cash flow. Turning it off freezes commerce in ways that ripple far beyond politics.

The deeper lesson is regional. East Africa’s payments systems are more interconnected than policymakers admit. When one country pulls the plug, liquidity leaks across borders. Kenya benefits in the short term, but the episode exposes how fragile trust becomes when digital money can be switched off overnight. For users, the message is blunt: resilience now means optionality, even if that option is a walk to another country.