Teraco Data Environments, the provider of colocation data centres and interconnection platforms in Africa, announced the successful completion of the previously announced agreement by Digital Realty, the global provider of cloud and carrier-neutral data centre, colocation and interconnection solutions, to acquire a majority interest in Teraco from a consortium of investors, including Berkshire Partners and Permira.

As South Africa’s largest and most densely interconnected data centre platform, Teraco supports the rapid growth of the continent’s Internet community through its expanding portfolio of data centres. Teraco’s experienced management team...

CoinMENA, a digital assets exchange in the Middle East and North Africa region, has announced recently that it will now onboard citizens and residents of Egypt from its base in Bahrain.

Users in Egypt can now open accounts on the platform and access all its services, including connecting their bank accounts to their CoinMENA wallets, allowing them to deposit and withdraw funds directly and safely. This is the latest in the series of expansions by the Bahrain-based cryptocurrency...

Absa Bank Kenya has announced that it will invest more than KES 2 billion this year in technological upgrades that significantly improve customers' banking experiences.

Part of this investment has gone toward the launch of an online account opening platform, which allows customers to in just a few minutes open Absa accounts remotely via the internet or smartphone at any time, from any location, and begin transacting immediately without visiting a branch.  Absa Bank Kenya Managing Director Jeremy Awori stated the...

Kenya’s cyber security skillset deficit is set to be reduced by adding 5,000 professionals to the pool.

The process to do so kicked off with the graduation of the first cohort of 200 executives from various banking and financial sector consulting institutions who had received practical training under the novel Cyber Shujaa program designed by the Kenya Bankers Association in partnership with USIU Africa and Serianu. The Challenge Fund for Youth Employment (CFYE) funded the program. In a speech read on her behalf...

Africa’s wealth management platform Ndovu has announced a strategic partnership withTulix, an Antler & Catalyst Fund portfolio company.  The partnership will enable the African Diaspora to access Kenya-based investment opportunities in a transparent and easy way. 

In 2021, remittances sent by migrant workers to and within Africa were estimated to be worth over US$95 billion. Kenya is among the five highest remittance recipient countries on the continent, receiving nearly USD 3bn annually (CBK, 2019...

Kenyan startup Crew HR & Payroll has rebranded to FaidiHR after it received an undisclosed amount of funding from SprintX, a US based Venture Capitalist (VC) for early stage startups.

The startup, which offers digital human resource solutions to African companies, said they would use the investment to expand their business in East Africa, eyeing entry into Uganda, Tanzania and DRC. The firm offers an all in one cloud platform that allows Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Africa...

Netskope has announced its continued global expansion of the Netskope NewEdge network with an additional data centre now launched and taking traffic in South Africa.

The new Cape Town deployment complements the existing Johannesburg infrastructure to address growing customer demand and provide more in-region capacity and redundancy. NewEdge is now powered by data centres in 57 regions, with everyone providing full compute for security traffic processing, the full breadth of SSE services, and accessibility to every...

The Internet of Things (IoT) has put its foot on the proverbial accelerator, delivering innovative solutions and disruptive inventions that reshape and redefine markets and sectors. According to McKinsey, it remains a leading digital trend thanks to its intelligent ability to converge both the digital and physical worlds to create smart solutions.

From energy efficiency to natural disaster monitoring to yield measurement and optimisation, IoT is measurably improving operations and agriculture environments. However, there are still some obstacles that the sector has to overcome to fully...

Kaspersky analysis has revealed that attacks related to data loss threats (phishing and scams/social engineering) increased significantly in Africa in Q2 2022 in comparison with the previous quarter. The company’s security solutions detected 10,722,886 phishing attacks in Africa in Q2.

Kenyan users were influenced the most by this type of threat: there were 5,098,534 phishing attacks detected in 3 months – a growth of 438% when compared to the previous quarter. It was followed by South Africa (4,578,216 detections and a...

The rate of digital fraud originating from Kenya decreased in Q1 2022, with the percentage of suspected online fraud attempts declining -60.9% from the same quarter last year, in line with the global decrease of -22.6% during that same time period.

TransUnion’s quarterly digital fraud analysis observed that while the overall rate of suspected digital fraud declined in Kenya, there were significant shifts year-over-year (YoY) within certain industries. Sectors such as financial services...

Unicaf is an online and blended learning higher education platform that is dedicated to making higher education of international standard accessible, by offering scholarship opportunities to professionals and young school leavers.

What are scholarship opportunities?

A scholarship could be defined as financial aid that relieves the burden of tuition fees and living costs that students and families have to pay to secure a place in secondary and tertiary education. Considering the rising costs of student expenses and debts, we could nowadays describe education...

The Africa Trade Expo (TATE) presents direct access to African buyers whose main aim is to source the latest products, establish partnerships, and conclude import/export deals. TATE is an ongoing virtual trade show for African businesses to network, collaborate, and enter into partnerships with international manufacturers and exporters. Present your new opportunities, network, build relationships and grow your business in African markets...

Future Foods is a virtual meeting place for importers, F&B managers, retail category buyers, owner-operators, agents, and distributors from across Africa’s diverse and booming market to come to conferences, to network, meet exhibitors, source products, new ingredients, retail shelf-ready products, and the latest processing, packaging, and logistics solutions. Future Foods connects attendees exhibitors across the...

Efayomi Carr is a Principal at Flourish Ventures, a Global Fintech Venture Firm investing in fintech entrepreneurs across the globe, whose innovations help people enhance financial health.

With deep fintech industry and country-specific expertise, Flourish is focused on building its investment in Africa and adding to its growing portfolio of a dozen startups located in Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt and Kenya that includes Apollo Agriculture, Fair Money, Financial Services Innovators (FSI)...

Remote digital biometric authentication and verification are now firmly in the mainstream thanks to the need for businesses to be continuously active online.

For this reason, technologies involving proven facial biometrics to onboard or authenticate customers, employees, suppliers, or the like, have become critical for the security of business operations, and for security and fraud prevention reasons. Using biometrics to access services has largely been popularised through mobile phones and increasingly the...

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) are changing the way we think about mobility - and transforming the digital network infrastructure that supports these vehicles. Soon, every car will be connected and able to talk to everything around it using Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technology, including other cars and smart city infrastructure. 

But as with any connected computing device, the advent of CAVs brings with it security threats, as the number of computing and network components both inside and outside a car will dramatically increase - raising the attack surface...