O’hayo,
Victoria from Techpoint here,
Here’s what I’ve got for you today:
- Why Kenya’s Lipa Later went under administration in 2025
- MTN is coming for the lending market
- Namibia faces pressure to reverse Starlink ban
- Enza gets Bank of Ghana approval for infrastructure play
Why Kenya’s Lipa Later went under administration in 2025
Kenya’s Lipa Later is officially gone as a going concern, and its founder, Eric Muli, is now publicly unpacking how it all unravelled. The company was placed under administration in March 2025, with Joy Vipinchandra Bhatt of Moore JVB Consulting appointed to oversee its restructuring.
Since then, there have been attempts to rescue what’s left, including interest from Canada’s Engage Capital, which reportedly tabled a $24.5 million offer, and London-based Advance Global Capital, which proposed a $5 million loan facility. In the middle of all this, Muli, now 34, has broken his silence in a May 2026 interview, laying out a mix of Covid-era repayment failures, investor pressure, currency shocks and early-stage missteps that ultimately sank the company.
To understand the scale of the fall, it helps to remember how big Lipa Later had become. Founded in 2017 when Muli was just 23, the startup grew into one of the region’s leading buy-now-pay-later players. At its peak, it had issued around $100 million in credit, served close to a million customers, employed more than 200 staff, and built a network of roughly 1,000 agents across Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Nigeria.
Lipa Later’s model was simple but capital-heavy: customers paid a deposit, took goods like phones or appliances, and repaid in instalments, while the company paid merchants upfront and bore the credit risk. Backed by multiple funding rounds from US VCs, it expanded aggressively, including acquiring Sky.Garden in 2021 and reaching a valuation near $100 million.
Its collapse highlights the fragility of Africa’s BNPL boom, which depends on continuous external funding. The model works in easy liquidity but breaks down when capital tightens. Rising interest rates, weaker economic conditions, and reduced investor appetite exposed these risks. Other Kenyan startups like Copia, Bonto, and Antara Health have also faced shutdowns or administration, signalling a broader correction in venture-backed models in the region.
The cracks, according to the founder, began during COVID-19 when repayment rates collapsed, with expected inflows dropping from millions of shillings to near zero. At the same time, Lipa Later borrowed in US dollars but earned in Kenyan shillings, so the weakening of the shilling from about KSh 100 to KSh 170 per dollar sharply increased its debt burden. Defaults also rose, with some customers reselling devices and abandoning repayments. Combined with investor pressure for rapid growth, the business became overstretched.
Victoria Fakiya – Senior Writer
Techpoint Digest
Stop struggling to find your tech career path
Discover in-demand tech skills and build a standout portfolio in this FREE 5-day email course
After the collapse, Muli moved on to found MRE Real Estate Limited in 2025, a property firm focused on retail and commercial projects reportedly worth around KSh 5 billion, with some former Lipa Later investors backing it. His pivot reflects a broader lesson: asset-backed businesses are easier to finance locally than high-risk BNPL lending. Meanwhile, Lipa Later remains a cautionary example of how quickly credit startups can unravel when funding tightens and macro conditions worsen.
MTN is coming for the lending market
Africa’s biggest telco has outlined its most ambitious fintech move yet. At MTN Group’s capital markets event on June 10, 2026, fintech CEO Serigne Dioum said the company wants to move from simply facilitating loans to lending directly to customers, subject to regulatory approval. MTN Group CEO Ralph Mupita also flagged Nigeria as a key market, noting that the company is pursuing additional licences to expand its financial services offering, though he didn’t specify which ones.
It marks a major shift in strategy: instead of just connecting customers to lenders, MTN wants to take on the lending risk itself and capture more of the value in the credit chain.
The numbers MTN is building toward are staggering. The company already has over 70 million active MOMO users, works with more than 2 million merchants, and supports an agent network of over 1.4 million people across Africa. In 2025 alone, MTN fintech generated roughly $2.8 billion in revenue, processed more than $500 billion in transaction value, and handled over 23 billion transactions. And yet, they see the current setup as leaving too much money on the table. More than one million people already access loans through MTN platforms every day, but those loans are booked by partner banks, not MTN. Becoming a direct lender would let the telco capture the interest income, own the customer data, and control the full credit experience. That’s a completely different business model from selling airtime.
The credit gap MTN is trying to fill is almost incomprehensibly large. Per a 2025 report by Nigeria’s National Credit Guarantee Company, nearly 80% of Nigerian MSMEs lack access to formal credit, while a Stears report estimates the sector faces a $236 billion funding gap. Nigeria isn’t the outlier but the most visible example of a continent-wide problem. Dioum noted that only 4% to 5% of adults across Africa currently have access to formal credit, leaving a massive underserved market that traditional financial institutions have consistently failed to reach. If MTN can crack this with its distribution scale — 1.4 million agents, 70 million mobile money users, telco data on spending patterns — it could reshape how tens of millions of Africans access money. Of course, it could also reshape how they get trapped in debt cycles if the product isn’t carefully designed, which is why the regulatory conversations are so critical.
MTN’s lending ambitions have been years in the making. In November 2024, its fintech arm, MoMo PSB, applied for payment licences to operate its own payment gateway and POS infrastructure in Nigeria, though those applications are still under review. The company is also awaiting regulatory approval for the separation of its Nigerian fintech business, a move that could pave the way for a standalone entity capable of raising capital and attracting investors.
The bigger prize is Africa’s rapidly growing fintech market. MTN estimates the continent’s fintech revenue pool could expand up to 13-fold over the next five years, driven largely by payments, remittances and lending. But despite the growth opportunity, more than 90% of transactions across MTN’s markets are still cash-based. That means key regulatory approvals and digital infrastructure still need to fall into place before MTN can fully execute its vision of becoming a major financial services player.
Namibia faces pressure to reverse Starlink ban
Namibia’s telecom regulator is under growing pressure to rethink its decision to block Starlink after hundreds of citizens formally challenged the ruling. The Communications Regulatory Authority of Namibia (CRAN) rejected Starlink’s licence application in March 2026, but since then, it has received about 624 review requests asking it to reverse or reconsider the decision. The backlash has now turned a technical licensing issue into a full-blown national debate over internet access, regulation, and who gets to connect the country.
The original rejection was based on compliance rules. CRAN said Starlink only met three out of six licensing requirements, including technical and financial criteria, but failed key conditions like local ownership (a 51% Namibian requirement), regulatory compliance history, and national security obligations. Authorities also flagged that Starlink had previously operated in the country without formal approval, which added to concerns around enforcement.
But the public reaction has been the real twist. During earlier consultations in late 2025, regulators received over 1,100 submissions, with the overwhelming majority supporting Starlink’s entry. In a country where large rural areas still lack reliable broadband, many citizens see satellite Internet as a practical workaround to patchy mobile and fixed-line coverage, and that frustration is now feeding directly into the licence challenge process.
What’s more, Namibia is now facing a familiar African telecom dilemma: how to balance strict regulatory control with urgent demand for connectivity. On one side, regulators argue that ownership laws and compliance rules protect sovereignty and ensure fair participation in the economy. On the other hand, supporters of Starlink argue that rigid rules are slowing down access to modern infrastructure in areas where traditional telecom operators have failed to deliver reliable service.
Starlink’s presence in Namibia has been controversial since at least November 2024, when regulators issued a cease-and-desist order over unlicensed operations. By March 2026, the formal licence rejection followed, setting off the current wave of appeals. Now, with hundreds of review requests and rising public pressure, Namibia finds itself at a crossroads: either maintain strict local ownership rules or adapt the framework to allow faster entry of global satellite players. The outcome could shape how the rest of the region handles similar Starlink applications.
Enza gets Bank of Ghana approval for infrastructure play
An Egypt-based payments infrastructure company, Enza, has just cleared a major regulatory hurdle in Ghana after securing a Payment Service Provider (Enhanced) licence from the Bank of Ghana. The approval puts the company in a position to begin rolling out services to banks, fintechs and other financial institutions in the country from this summer. The Enhanced licence is one of the higher-tier approvals in Ghana’s payments framework, allowing firms to go beyond basic services and operate deeper payment processing and integration infrastructure across the financial system.
Unlike consumer-facing apps, Enza isn’t trying to be something users download and interact with directly. Instead, it sits behind the scenes as infrastructure, essentially providing the technology that powers payments for banks and fintechs. In simple terms, it’s the “plumbing” that enables transactions to move between institutions, rather than the wallet or app users actually see. The company says its goal is to bring scalable, Africa-focused payments infrastructure to the market, and it expects to onboard its first Ghanaian clients in the coming months, although it hasn’t yet named any partners.
Why this matters is because Ghana has become one of West Africa’s most closely watched digital finance markets. The country already has a strong mobile money ecosystem, led by services like MTN MoMo and Telecel Cash, and regulators have been actively tightening and modernising the system through initiatives like interoperable payment standards. For banks and fintechs, a new licensed infrastructure provider like Enza could mean more competition in the backend systems that power payments, potentially improving efficiency, lowering costs, and expanding what financial institutions can offer their customers.
Ghana’s approach to digital finance didn’t happen overnight. Mobile money adoption accelerated rapidly over the past decade, eventually overtaking traditional banking activity in transaction volumes. That growth forced regulators like the Bank of Ghana to continuously update their frameworks, including introducing tiered PSP licensing structures and pushing interoperability standards such as GhQR. The result is a market that is both highly active and tightly regulated, making entry more difficult, but also more credible for firms that do secure approval.
For Enza, Ghana is more than just a single-market launch. It’s effectively a strategic entry point into West Africa’s wider payments ecosystem. Getting licensed in a market known for regulatory rigour gives the company a kind of credibility it can carry into other expansion plans across the continent. The real test now is execution, including how quickly it can move from regulatory approval to live deployments with banks and fintechs, and whether it can scale beyond early partnerships into meaningful transaction volumes that justify its broader continental ambitions.
In case you missed it
What I’m watching
Opportunities
- Qore is hiring for several positions. Apply here.
- Oui Capital has an exclusive AI mixer coming up on June 26. Interested founders, researchers, and engineers should apply here. Apply here.
- inDrive is hiring to fill several vacancies in different countries. Apply here.
- Are you a female-led tech or tech-enabled business preparing for sustainable growth and opportunity to access capital? Apply for the Female Founders Growth Programme and grab up to $2 million. Apply here.
- Bamboo is hiring in Ghana and Nigeria. Apply here.
- Cowrywise is recruiting some engineers. Apply here.
- PiggyVest is looking for a Product Technical Manager. Apply here.
- Paystack is hiring for a few roles. Apply here.
- Moniepoint is recruiting for several roles. Apply here.
- Flutterwave is hiring for several roles in Nigeria, the UK, and the US. Apply here.
- As one of Techpoint Africa’s most engaged readers, you have a direct hand in shaping what we publish next. Take our quick, 3-minute survey to tell us the stories and features you value most. Your responses are anonymous, and your feedback will help guide our editorial focus in the months ahead. Fill the survey here.
- Moniepoint is hiring for over 100 roles. Apply here.
- To pitch your startup or product to a live audience, check out this link.
- Follow Techpoint Africa’s WhatsApp channel to stay on top of the latest trends and news in the African tech space here.
Have a fun weekend!
Victoria Fakiya for Techpoint Africa
