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In the beginning was Taxi Park

The news of Uber’s exit from Nigeria has dominated conversations this week, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the first cab-hailing service in Nigeria. That distinction belongs to a startup called Taxi Park (later called Tranzit), which launched sometime in 2012 at a time when TechCabal used to write snazzy paragraphs like this:

“Ironically, I quickly dismissed it [Taxi Park] as crud at the time. Partly because it was being pitched by one of its founders, whose SMS/BBM style of writing made him seem barely literate…Right off the bat, they were asking for my phone number, and I remember thinking “hey I just got here, the fuck do you want my phone number for?”

Bring back that TechCabal.

By 2013, more ride-hailing startups were springing up. There was the Rocket Internet-backed Easy Taxi, Afrocab, Taxipixi and Saytaxi.

Most of the apps worked roughly the same way. They recruited drivers, trained them on how to use smartphones and maps, matched them to trips, and collected a commission. Easy Taxi charged drivers 10% and, in its early days, gave them smartphones.

Given where smartphone and internet penetration were at the time, you could also hail some of these services through SMS.

When the first signs that Uber would launch in Lagos, the “Vegas of Africa,” were visible by April of 2014, the existing ride-hailing players welcomed the challenge.

“The beautiful thing about competition is that it prevents you from being complacent and forces you to continue innovating,” said Bankole Cardoso of Easy Taxi. Taxi Park’s co-founder Nicole Ugbomeh was even open to collaboration. “We think working with Uber could be beneficial to both parties.”

Nigeria had just rebased its GDP to about $500 billion, overtaking South Africa as the continent’s largest economy. Lagos felt like a city in which almost anything could work.

Despite this optimism, the funding gap would have worried Uber’s competitors. By April 2014, Uber had already raised about $307 million, and by the time it launched in Lagos, it raised another $1.2 billion. Easy Taxi had raised around $37 million globally at the time, while Tranzit’s funding was somewhere in the region of $300k.

While it was great to be so flush with cash, Uber’s main advantage was that it understood that the ride-hailing product was not really the app, but how quickly a decent car showed up. While Easy Taxi and Tranzit spent years recruiting taxi drivers and trying to bring them online, Uber was looking to make a driver out of everyone with a really nice car. It was paying bonuses to existing drivers when they referred new drivers to sign up. Those new drivers earned ₦40,000 once they completed forty trips.

Uber began in Lagos with the expensive UberBlack: SUVs and new-ish cars for customers willing to pay a premium. In December 2014, it introduced the mass-market UberX and began relentlessly wooing customers.

New users got ₦5,000 first-ride credits, and the ride-hailing company attached itself to events and corporate partnerships. The fancy foreign app was now coming down the price curve to meet everyone else.

Beyond the customer incentives, Uber’s early decision to build a community around its drivers was brilliant. It held sessions and lunches where drivers could meet the Lagos team, ask questions, complain, and hear about changes to the service. It also called them “driver-partners,” language that would become meaningless once the economics of the business changed.

That community provided a steady source of feedback about riders and what was happening on Lagos roads while making drivers feel invested in the company’s success. People who had joined to earn money were soon convincing friends to sign up and defending Uber as though they had joined a movement.

Uber initially charged Lagos drivers a 20% commission, twice Easy Taxi’s rate, and by the middle of 2016, it jacked the commission to 25%. Yet drivers didn’t complain because Uber offered enough trips and bonuses to offset the commission.

By July 2016, two years after launch, Uber had completed more than one million trips in Lagos. Its millionth trip, from Yaba to Lekki, happened on July 16.

Its march to dominance was not without stumbles; Uber launched with card payments only, an important part of the Uber experience globally. But Uber’s merchant accounts were outside Nigeria, so local banks treated rides as international transactions.

As Nigeria’s foreign-exchange crisis worsened in late 2015, some riders were charged more than 20% above the fare shown in the app, while others reported double debits.

In January 2016, Uber began experimenting with cash payments in Lagos and partnered with Paga to accept local cards. Cash brought many more Nigerians within reach of the service, but complicated Uber’s otherwise clean model. Drivers would collect the entire fare, including Uber’s commission, which the company had to deduct from their subsequent card earnings. It was inelegant, but it worked.

By this time, the competition Uber met in the market was fading into the horizon. Easy Taxi left Africa in April 2016 while Tranzit’s public trail simply went cold. The companies had their own problems, but Uber had read the market better and knew that this was about who could put the most and best cars on the road.

Yet as the market began to change, Uber stopped adapting and made strategic missteps that allowed Bolt, and later inDrive, to trounce it.

On Monday, May 8, 2017, Uber driver switched off their apps and drove to the company’s office in Lekki to protest a decision to cut Lagos fares by 40% in response to a price reduction by the increasingly popular Taxify. Drivers, who Uber had courted for years, were not consulted.

The cut exposed how little the word “partner” meant. Uber still took 25% of every fare, while Taxify took 15%. Drivers organised through WhatsApp groups and began moving to Taxify in their hundreds.

Taxify didn’t care about loyalty or exclusivity; it only needed to make trips more attractive on its platform than on Uber. Drivers could keep both apps open and accept whichever request paid better; as more of them chose Taxify, Uber’s wait times rose and riders followed. Taxify was using the same supply advantage Uber had once used against Easy Taxi and Tranzit.

Two months later, Uber tried to repair the relationship by opening a large driver-support centre in Maryland, promising drivers “a voice and a choice.” But the relationship had become increasingly one-way, and by 2020, a drivers’ union accused Uber of avoiding repeated meetings over pricing, safety and regulation.

Uber also squandered its momentum by moving too slowly outside Lagos and Abuja. In December 2020, Bolt launched in ten Nigerian cities at once, taking its total to 21. Uber, which had arrived two years earlier, was still only in Lagos, Abuja and Benin City.

Bolt was operating in 33 cities by 2025, and was, according to Sensor Tower, Nigeria’s most-downloaded travel and mobility app. There is no public breakdown of trips or revenue that gives us a neat final score, but Uber no longer set the pace.

Uber did not get chased out by some uniquely Nigerian hostility; instead, it spent years losing relevance through strategic missteps.

The manner of its exit completed the journey from driver-partners to disposable suppliers. The company gave no warning, with drivers learning of the shutdown in real time as some riders received the notice while they were still in an Uber.

Twelve years after inviting drivers to lunches and promising them a seat at the table, Uber did not even tell them the table was being cleared.

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Moove-ing On

Moove is considering closing its Nigerian business and handing around 3,000 drivers ownership of their cars before they have finished paying for them, two people close to the situation told Notadeepdive.

The options being considered include reducing their outstanding balances to a level that would allow early ownership transfer, or waiving the remaining payments entirely. It is unclear how many of the drivers still have outstanding payments.

Moove did not respond to a request for comments.

The deliberations preceded Uber’s exit from Nigeria this week, those people said. Despite Uber’s abrupt announcement and immediate exit (some riders and drivers learned about the shutdown while trips were still underway), two people with knowledge of the process said the decision to leave was made several weeks ago.

Moove, which became a unicorn last month, financed the now-famous tiny Suzuki cars used by many Uber drivers. It solved an important problem for Uber by adding drivers who could not afford to buy cars.

On Thursday, Technext reported that Moove would allow its drivers to work for Bolt and inDrive.

That could keep the drivers earning while Moove decides whether to wind down the business, but it would not automatically recreate the system behind its arrangement with Uber. Uber’s trip data helped Moove assess and monitor drivers, while its payments integration allowed Moove to collect repayments directly from their earnings.

Without equivalent integrations with Bolt and inDrive, Moove would need another way to collect from thousands of drivers every week. That makes handing over the cars a practical option.

In 2023, TechCabal reported that Moove drivers paid ₦56,604 weekly for four years, amounting to ₦11.77 million in scheduled payments at an annual interest rate of 8.9%.

If all 3,000 drivers have between one and two years remaining and are still on those terms—both large assumptions—a crude calculation puts their outstanding scheduled payments at between ₦8.8 billion and ₦17.7 billion.

The payments also cover insurance, maintenance and other services it would stop providing once ownership transfers, and the contracts have changed over time.

Moove must compare the financing portion of those remaining payments with the cost of continuing to service the cars and collect every week. Its other option is to recover the cars from drivers, store them and find buyers willing to pay enough to make the exercise worthwhile.

When Lagos restricted commercial motorcycles in February 2020, OPay began moving ORide away from passenger trips and towards deliveries. The company reportedly had around 8,000 motorcycles and planned to sell half of them for between ₦180,000 and ₦270,000 each. Individuals and logistics companies quickly began buying them.

Moove faces a harder version of that problem because repossessing and selling thousands of used Suzuki cars would take considerably more time and money. For the drivers, receiving the cars early would be unusually generous, but for Moove, it may be cheaper than collecting everything it is owed.

The company also no longer resembles the vehicle-financing startup that launched in Nigeria. It is valued at $2.1 billion and operates across several markets. It is also building infrastructure for autonomous fleets like Waymo.

Its Nigeria has nevertheless shown the limits of the original model.

When Moove launched, the naira was more stable, and drivers could more easily cover weekly payments and living expenses. As the naira weakened and the cost of cars and fuel rose sharply, drivers’ earnings were declining. Uber could not raise fares indefinitely because its customers were suffering a cost-of-living crisis, yet Moove still needed drivers’ repayments to cover the cost of the cars it had financed.

Moove put thousands of cars on the road for people who could not otherwise afford them and created earning opportunities. But creating work and car ownership turned out to be two different problems.

While Moove considers exiting, Future Africa remains keen on the mobility space. The firm was one of Moove’s early investor, initially putting in a little over $100,000 before investing considerably more, one person with knowledge of the investment said.

It has since sold part of its stake and taken some money off the table, even as it invested in Moove’s latest round through another vehicle. Future Africa is also backing another Nigeria-focused mobility startup that remains in stealth, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

If Moove waives the remaining payments, thousands of drivers will own their cars earlier than expected. It would be a generous outcome for them, but it would also show how badly the economics have deteriorated. What Moove is still owed may no longer be worth the trouble of collecting it.

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*An earlier version of this newsletter claimed Future Africa was Moove's first institutional investor. That claim has now been clarified.

If you missed Friday’s Notadeepdive, catch up here.

Ride-hailing company Uber will begin winding down its Nigerian business today, ending a 12-year operation in the country. The decision to wind down Nigerian operations is connected to broader layoffs in the business, which affected 3,300 people, approximately 10% of its headcount.

The ride-sharing giant is reducing the number of teams with one or two members by 50%, and letting go of staff who are “more than seven layers down from the CEO,” per Bloomberg.

It will also drastically reduce remote roles, allowing less than 1% of its staff to work remotely.

“We are writing to share some difficult news. After a thorough review of the business, we have made the tough decision to wind down our operations in Nigeria.”

Uber launched in Nigeria in 2014 as one of the first foreign ride-hailing operations in the country, adapting its model to accommodate cash payments, bucking the usual trend of card payments in other geographies.

For a while, it set the pace for ride-hailing, holding a specific standard for cars, drivers, and even passengers. Yet, the e-hailing space soon became a race to the bottom.

The Estonian firm Bolt (formerly Taxify) launched in 2016 and was keen to win market share. It began a brutal price war with Uber, and even relaxed standards for cars and drivers in the space.

While Uber initially treated ride-hailing as some semi-luxurious service, Bolt rightly viewed it as a commodity for Nigeria’s thin middle class. This difference in thinking would eventually allow Bolt to have some 20,000 active cars in Nigeria, some 60% of the market share.

Other entrants like In-Drive hastened a race to the bottom for the ride-hailing space, with an interesting model that allowed passengers and drivers to haggle over prices. They also relaxed car specifications, essentially recognising that many users didn’t care too much about the make of the cars.

To be fair, Uber also realised the commodification of the space and responded with Uber Go, a cheaper alternative that used tiny Suzuki cars financed by Uber. As a solution to a car supply problem, it was brilliant.

In reality, a naira devaluation meant that Moove, which raised dollar financing to buy those Suzukis, would need drivers to pay more money if it was not to end up holding the wrong end of the deal. Inflation also narrowed the pool of people who could pay for private rides.

Perhaps more importantly, the leading ride-hailing services remained reluctant to lower their commission from 15-20% per ride, forcing drivers to forego loyalty to any one platform.

Drivers became experts at teasing out what platforms would pay the most for trips and simply went with the best offering. Uber and Bolt eventually increased base fares after Nigeria ended fuel subsidies and fuel prices tripled.

Ironically, Uber had driver loyalty in Nigeria when it began operations and used community as a way to earn loyalty. Yet, drivers felt disenfranchised as the business went on and often protested that they were no longer at the decision-making table at Uber and Bolt.

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OPay’s Cheap Deposits

If you missed Friday’s Notadeepdive, catch up.

Around here, I often say that lending is easy and that you need cheap money to make it work. If you don’t have ₦1 billion sitting idly in a bank account or under your pillow, you want someone else’s money at almost no cost.

So if you get money at 35% interest, you must charge considerably more than 35% because you need to account for bad loans and the cost of running the business. It ‘s already so expensive that it will likely not work.

What if you had a bank? Customers will leave money in current and savings accounts, and regardless of the ads, you’ll pay them little or nothing for it. You can take some of those deposits and lend them at much higher rates (this is extremely simplistic but you get the point). The more deposits banks/fintechs attract, the less they depend on expensive borrowing to fund loans.

In 2025, OPay’s customer deposits soared from $244.2 million in 2024 to $705 million, roughly ₦1 trillion. Its deposit base is already roughly one-third the size of Sterling or Wema Bank.

These deposit figures have not previously been reported.

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How much did all of customer deposits cost OPay? The company reported only $2 million in total interest expense in 2025, up slightly from $1.9 million a year earlier, even as customer deposits almost tripled.

We cannot tease out the exact cost of these deposits because the financial statements don’t show how much of that interest expense was paid to depositors or at what point in the year the deposits arrived.

What we know is that as customer deposits increased by $460.8 million in 2025, cash and short-term investments rose by almost the same amount. The close match suggests that OPay kept most of its money in liquid assets rather than lending it out (hello there, GTCO).

The financial statements do not explain why deposits grew so quickly, but we can take a stab in the dark and ascribe it to OPay’s payments business. People receive transfers, merchants collect payments, and customers pay bills inside the app. Some of that money remains in the app, while OPay’s interest-paying product (O’Wealth) gives customers another reason not to move it.

Beneath these deposits sat another $1.03 billion in redeemable convertible preferred shares supplied by investors.

These shares can be converted into ordinary equity, while their redemption provisions may eventually require OPay to repay the investors. In 2025, their carrying value increased by $89.5 million through accretion, an accounting adjustment that moves the balance towards its redemption value.

The accretion did not reduce OPay’s $72.5 million net income or require an $89.5 million cash payment that year. It was instead deducted when calculating the result attributable to ordinary shareholders. After the deduction, OPay reported a $17 million loss attributable to them.

OPay therefore has two different funding advantages. Customer deposits provide a large supply of extremely cheap money. The preferred shares provide a substantial layer of investor capital beneath the company’s liabilities. OPay could keep much of the new funding in liquid investments, earn $47.3 million of interest from them and operate a growing loan book without relying heavily on expensive borrowing.

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Lending is easy

On Notadeepdive, I frequently say that lending is easy. Once you find a source of funding (preferably customer deposits), a few hundred people will be milling around your app, trying to get a loan before the end of the day. While the Nigerian saying is that garri doesn’t need advertising, I think the more accurate version is that personal loans don’t need ads.

Unsecured personal loans, a.k.a. loans without collateral, are popular for fairly obvious reasons. You could be one week from payday and desperately need money. Or you could be trying to complete the money for an unexpected purchase, like replacing the phone someone stole from you at the bus stop.

According to CRC Credit Bureau’s 2025 report, the average Nigerian consumer loan is about ₦136,000 ($89). The average individual American loan account carried a balance of $8,437.

Anyway, lending is easy, but you only stay in business when you can get the money back.

American lenders can consider a borrower’s income, existing debts, credit score, years of information about mortgages, credit cards, car loans, and missed payments. Even then, a loan is an educated guess about what the borrower will do next, and a wrong guess is expensive. In America, the borrower’s incentive to repay is tied to their credit score.

In Nigeria, a Bank Verification Number can confirm a borrower’s identity, and bank statements can show cash flow or salary. But neither reveals the borrower’s existing debts or their willingness to repay an unsecured loan.

And while Nigeria has three credit bureaus, their records are not always identical, so lenders often need to check at least two to get a fuller picture. Many digital lenders also do not consistently report their loans, so “smart” borrowers can owe several lenders while each one sees only part of the problem.

OPay’s $121 million school fees

OPay’s headline numbers have made the rounds in the past week, and I’ve been dying to see its consolidated financial statements. The numbers floating around are not as impactful without seeing the full picture. Thankfully, that bit of mischief has now been managed.

OPay sharply increased loan disbursements between 2024 and 2025, with $938.3 million in new loans in 2025. Unless you have some magic formula that no one else in lending has, that kind of growth will come with loan defaults.

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While OPay’s revenue more than doubled in 2025, its provision for expected credit losses nearly quintupled. For every dollar of revenue, OPay booked roughly 23 cents in expected credit losses, up from 12 cents the previous year.

Even with millions of active customers and visibility over their spending patterns, OPay is simply offering customers small loans and watching what happens. They then adjust the next offer based on borrower behaviour.

It’s hard to blame them because transaction data says little to nothing about willingness to repay. It also doesn’t tell you if a borrower is repaying just so they can look reliable until the limit increases to an amount that is substantial enough for them to risk “running away with.”

OPay still made $72.5 million in profit in 2025 (look away now, Jumia), which gives it room, for now, to absorb the defaults that come with growing its lending business this quickly.

In a Notadeepdive edition from last October, I described FairMoney’s success in similar terms. It burnt cash learning who would repay, then lowered its cost of funds until the maths worked.

In 2024, FairMoney generated ₦121.9 billion in revenue and made ₦7.9 billion in profit. It also recorded ₦59.4 billion in impairments on loans and other assets.

FairMoney charged enough interest to absorb those impairments, learnt from millions of loan applications, and eventually funded more of its lending with customer deposits instead of expensive investor capital and debt.

There is no version of mass-market unsecured lending where everyone pays because underwriting is a series of guesses. The lender records which ones were wrong and prices the next batch so that the good loans pay for the bad ones.

OPay’s $121.3 million provision is part of the cost of learning which borrowers will repay. It originated almost $1 billion in new loans, made room for a large number of bad ones, and still made $72.5 million.

That is a lot of school fees, but OPay can afford them.

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Retreat

During the 2020 and 2021 funding boom, fundraising rounds were frequently followed by expansion announcements. In that era of abundance, your startup story had to be expansive; there’s nothing that excites investors more than the idea that you’re pursuing a continental opportunity.

Expansion also allowed you to “derisk your Nigerian business” as promised in many a pitch deck. Multiple countries could reduce dependence on the naira and the Nigerian economy, and if your product could reach Nigerian users in the diaspora, even better.

Expansion became another step in the playbook, often without rigorous questions about what would allow the company to succeed in those new markets.

At its peak, Jumia was in Rwanda, Cameroon, and Tanzania, which in hindsight sounds quite ridiculous. It exited those markets once it became a serious company.

One of the ironies of Nigeria being a difficult market is that it can build exceptional operational ability while creating a company perfectly adapted to Nigeria.

A Nigerian fintech, for example, has to juggle painful integrations with banks and wicked regulators. It must combine a deep knowledge about how Nigerians move money with the deftness required for black swan events like the 2023 cash crunch.

As the fintech expands, it will need to build new relationships and adapt to customer behaviour that is forever changing, forcing it to become a second startup in every new country.

Globacom expanded to Ghana, but its Nigerian network effects meant nothing to Ghanaian subscribers, who already had established expectations about coverage. After ten years, Globacom could only win 2% market share.

Sometimes demand is not enough

When Vendease entered Ghana in 2023, it claimed that weekly demand sometimes exceeded $1 million. But it could fulfil only about a quarter of those orders because it needed local funding. Its Ghanaian ambitions lasted one year.

Vendease supplied restaurants that often ordered food items without immediately paying for them. So the faster orders grew, the more money Vendease would have needed to meet working capital requirements.

The logistics startup, Kobo360, often paid truck owners upfront while its large corporate clients would pay 30 to 90 days later. While this problem remained unsolved, it raised $79 million and expanded into Ghana, Kenya, and other African markets.

The financing weakness that plagued its Nigeria business was replicated in every new country, and when credit and venture funding tightened, the system stopped working.

The concierge startup, Eden Life’s Kenya expansion followed its acquisition of Lynk in 2022, but by 2026, it had paused consumer operations in Kenya and Nigeria after the economics of the consumer home-services model simply didn’t work.

Olawale Ajai’s study of failed Africa-to-Africa expansions found that organisational and strategic weaknesses explained failure better than host-country conditions. Companies often explain new market failures with regulation and consumer behaviour, obscuring the possibility that the original decision to enter said markets may have been affected by insufficient local knowledge or managerial capacity.

African institutional investors interviewed for a 2025 study shared that the incentives for managers to expand did not always align with shareholder interests. Managers may gain status from leading a multinational company even when shareholders receive poor returns.

Yet the evidence is imperfect. Most studies interview companies that successfully became international, while failed subsidiaries disappear and their executives move on. One Nigerian banking study used only 25 observations and could not establish whether expansion improved profitability or whether profitable banks were simply better able to expand. Existing research is better at explaining the courage to enter than the returns after entry.

Advantages don’t always travel

This week, Moniepoint announced it would phase out MonieWorld, the UK remittance product it spoke about confidently last year.

Remittances promised foreign-currency revenue from a large Nigerian diaspora; cue that joke about shaking any tree and Africa-focused remittance companies falling out of it.

For a company of Moniepoint’s size and reputation, few people entertained the possibility that this expansion could fail but big companies fail at new things all the time.

The reporting since Moniepoint’s announcement has coalesced around how MonieWorld was growing in a difficult market and how we need to applaud the company for trying.

Those publications also cited Moniepoint’s claim of transaction-volume growth as proof that Moniepoint didn’t ditch this product because it wasn’t growing. But transaction volume growth alone tells us very little because a business can grow quickly from an irrelevant base and you can juice transaction volume with freebies.

In counting the cost, Moniepoint’s UK entity reported no revenue and lost about £1 million while the remittance product was being built in 2024. It also allotted £5.9 million in share capital to the entity and later acquired Bancom, an electronic-money institution, to obtain the necessary licence.

So we know that Moniepoint already spent heavily before launch and that sixteen months later, it could not justify continuing.

Kuda traveled down the same remittance road three years earlier.

Whatever happened to Kuda’s first remittance business?

Kuda launched a UK-to-Nigeria remittance product in 2022 through Kuda EMI Ltd, a dedicated British entity.

In 2022 and 2023, Kuda EMI recorded total revenue of £634 (yes, you read that right) while its direct costs were £252,157. Its cumulative losses over the two years reached £982,510.

Kuda has since relaunched another cross-border product built with a different structure, and it remains to be seen whether that attempt will work.

Kuda MFB, the Nigerian business, reported more than 300 million transactions worth ₦14.3 trillion in the first quarter of 2025 alone.

Increasingly, Nigerian technology companies establish offices and add countries to their maps, but their income statements remain overwhelmingly Nigerian.

Interswitch has operations across several countries, but generated about 90% of its 2025 revenue from Nigeria. That was an improvement from 94% a year earlier. You can’t describe Interswitch as a genuinely pan-African company by revenue.

OPay operates in Nigeria, Egypt, Indonesia and Pakistan but Nigeria contributed 88% of its 2025 revenue.

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Why the banks eventually fared better

Nigerian banks are an exception to the struggles of international expansion. UBA reported that operations outside Nigeria generated 51.7% of group revenue in 2024. Access said its foreign banking subsidiaries produced 65% of its banking group’s profit before tax in the first half of 2025. About 35% of GTCO’s 2025 revenue came from outside Nigeria.

It took the banks roughly two decades to get there; they’ve been helped along the way by local deposits. A startup will use investor equity from the parent company to finance recurring foreign working-capital needs, while a bank can raise deposits in the country where it lends. Its assets and liabilities can grow in the same currency.

Banks don’t always begin with the expensive task of persuading millions of unfamiliar retail customers to adopt a new product. Despite these advantages, their progress was hardly frictionless.

Diamond Bank built businesses in Benin, Togo, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire. Its main West African subsidiary was profitable in 2016, earning ₦911 million after tax, but that profit sat on more than ₦401 billion of assets, a very thin return for a parent bank that needed capital at home. Diamond sold the businesses and later gave up its international banking licence.

A foreign subsidiary can be profitable and still be a bad use of group capital. Banking regulators also ring-fence local capital and liquidity, which means money in one subsidiary cannot always be pulled home when the parent needs it.

The banks eventually found a model that travelled, but only after acquisitions, recapitalisations, exits and years of learning. Their present success should not erase the failed experiments that produced it.

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Interswitch’s Revenue is Surging

For a mature business, Interswitch is one of Africa’s fastest-growing technology companies. Last year, its revenue topped ₦100 billion for the first time, driven by an incredible 50% annual growth, according to its most recent financial report for the fiscal year ended March 2025. And over the last five years, gross revenue at the Nigerian payments company has surged fourfold, from ₦39 billion in 2021 to ₦137.5 billion last year. Interswitch is recording an impressive run thanks to the growing adoption of digital payments in Africa, notably in Nigeria, which accounts for 90% of its revenue.

Founded in 2002, Interswitch is one of the pioneers of digital payments in Nigeria. For years, Interswitch’s bread and butter was providing switching and transaction processing infrastructure to banks and enterprises, internally branded as Purepay. Now, a growing share of its business comes from retail services, particularly Verve, its card network scheme, dubbed Paytoken internally, according to its financial statements.

Like Mastercard and Visa, Verve cards are issued by banks and consumer-facing fintechs to customers, while Interswitch takes a small cut on all transactions done with the card. First launched in the early 2010s, Verve is offered in a number of African countries, and partnerships with international platforms like Capital One’s Discover enable cardholders to make payments abroad.

Interswitch operates other direct-to-consumer financial services through the QuickTeller and M-Kudi mobile money brands. And, as expected of every Nigerian fintech, the company also sells airtime recharge and bulk telecom texting products.

Over the last decade, Verve has been the standout performer with sustained growth. It now represents 32% of Interswitch’s gross revenues, with year-on-year card revenue rising 39% by March 2025. On the one hand, Verve is benefiting from the faster adoption of card payments in Nigeria, a process that has taken more than two decades to reach critical mass. On the other hand, Nigeria’s challenging macroeconomic environment, especially exchange rate volatility in recent years, has discouraged financial institutions from issuing foreign cards, such as Visa and Mastercard, to manage dollar-related costs.

The size of the domestic market is also fueling Interswitch’s growth. The number of Nigerian adults who have access to financial services has jumped to over 64% or 111 million, up from 40 million in 2020, according to think tank Enhancing Financial Innovation & Access (EFInA). This is thanks to the rapid advancement of mobile payment solutions by merchants and customers. While fintechs like OPay and Moniepoint race for dominance over peer-to-peer and merchant payments, Interswitch has primarily positioned itself as an infrastructure provider to power the real-time payments and debit card issuing needs of these companies.

In 2024, the total value of the country’s electronic retail payments, which includes merchant and peer-to-peer transfers, reached ₦1.1 quadrillion, as I predicted a year earlier, according to data from NIBSS. That figure is three times the size of the Nigerian economy. To put this in perspective, US retail electronic payments represent only a third of its GDP. Interswitch now “processes more than 90% of Nigeria’s card and mobile money transactions”, according to LeapFrog Investments, which acquired a stake in the business in 2022. Interswitch doesn’t disclose its own payments data in its financial reports.

As a result of these good fortunes, Interswitch’s profit margin widened to 11% in fiscal year 2025, its first double-digit earnings since 2022, before the naira significantly depreciated against the dollar.

Despite its run of positive results, Interswitch continues to struggle with rising costs. Its administrative expenses, which include salaries and other operating bills, are growing much faster than its revenue. Costs have ballooned from ₦26.3 billion in 2021, representing 67% of revenue, to ₦96.2 billion (or 70% of revenue) in 2025, which itself was a 43% increase from the previous year. Interestingly, the company is incurring an ever-growing bill despite moderate staffing increases. For example, in 2025, its total workforce rose 16%, but salary expenses alone surged 78%.

Even more crucial, Nigeria’s inflationary environment is hurting Interswitch’s top-line performance. While the company has achieved average revenue growth of 30% over the last six years, inflation-adjusted annual revenue for the same period grew at a mere 9%

Its investors have already priced in these challenges. In 2022, when Interswitch announced a $110 million investment from Tana Africa and LeapFrog, the round valued the company at $750 million, a 25% discount from 2019, when it raised at $1 billion, according to data from PitchBook, the market intelligence platform. Neither Interswitch nor its investors disclosed the company’s valuation at the time. But PitchBook’s figure is a highly reliable proxy. Perhaps that discount was due to Nigeria’s exchange rate decline, which has only worsened in subsequent years. However, this doesn’t tell the full story.

In 2019, Interswitch’s $1 billion valuation implied it was worth ₦306 billion in local currency terms at the time. Put differently, the fintech was valued at 11 times, or 11x, its fiscal year 2019 revenue. Revenue multiple is one approach to valuing a business, especially one that is witnessing high growth but has inconsistent profits.

Following the 2022 investment from LeapFrog and Tana, Interswitch’s revised $750 million valuation implied its naira market value had actually remained relatively flat at ₦315 billion, suggesting a multiple compression to just 6x its revenue for fiscal year 2022. The prevailing exchange rate at the time was ~₦421 to a dollar. Although Interswitch’s revenue had grown substantially between 2019 and 2022, the new investors were only willing to pay 6x for each naira of that revenue compared to the 11x investors paid in 2019.

Applying that 6x multiple to Interswitch’s fiscal year 2025 revenue (₦138 billion) would yield an ₦825 billion valuation — a massive jump — or just $611 million due to Nigeria’s significantly beaten-down exchange rate of ₦1,350 as of today.

The double whammy of devaluation and a challenging inflationary environment in Nigeria may have made it difficult to reprice the company upwards to account for its objectively faster growth rate. At an 11x multiple, Interswitch’s fiscal year 2022 revenue would have put its valuation at ~$1.4 billion.

Nevertheless, that round priced the fintech at a discount, even compared to the trading multiples of its peers like Visa (15x), Mastercard (16x), and even Adyen (32x) at the time. But at least it was better than the downtrodden PayPal (3x), which continues to be the sick man of the global payments market. In addition, Interswitch’s latest valuation puts it significantly lower than younger fintechs like Flutterwave and Moniepoint, valued at $3.3 billion and $1.4 billion, according to PitchBook data from each company’s most recent funding round.

Elsewhere, Norway-based browser company Opera valued its 9.5% stake in Nigeria-based OPay at $294.6 million at the end of 2025, according to its financial statement filed with the US SEC. This implies that OPay’s valuation now stands at $3.1 billion, a 13% jump from its fair value in 2024. Eight-year-old OPay, which is backed by several major Chinese investors, is on track to go public later this year after hiring Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase for its planned stock market debut at a ~$4 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg. Interswitch, on the other hand, has remained majority-owned by UK-based PE firm Helios Investment Partners since 2010.

Going forward, Interswitch’s focus appears to be on revenue growth by reinforcing its core business and expanding into new areas over the next few years, especially in non-Nigerian markets, which represented 10% of total revenue in 2025, up from 6% one year earlier. The company is stepping up its presence across the continent through a seven-year partnership with Nebraska-based fintech, ACI Worldwide, to sell ACI’s payment services, including real-time infrastructure, in 32 Sub-Saharan African countries.

As Nigeria’s fintech market grows and inflation decelerates, Interswitch is poised to benefit as long as it brings costs under control.

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Connecting the banks

At some point in October 2003, someone put a UBA card into a First Bank ATM and withdrew ₦1,000.

Today, that sounds unremarkable, but it took nearly twenty years of engineering and an unusual act of cooperation among rival banks to make it possible.

In 2002, Nigeria had roughly 90 banks, 68 ATMs and 1,800 POS terminals. A transfer took three days, and many banks could not connect to their own branches, let alone another bank’s network.

The accepted Interswitch story begins with Mitchell Elegbe and an ATM in Scotland. Our episode goes further back: to TCASS and Telnet, the engineers who connected Nigeria’s first bank branches, seven banks that invested ₦200 million, and a cap table designed to solve a trust problem.

Nnanna Ijezie and I spent months reconstructing the story.

Africa Built: The Interswitch Story

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Break-even*

In late 2022, there were few jobs with a clearer KPI than running Jumia. Co-CEOs Jeremy Hodara and Sacha Poignonnec had just left after three years of promising and failing to deliver on profitability.

Profitability offered Jumia the best route to repairing the “Amazon of Africa” narrative after fraud allegations damaged its credibility in 2019. It did not come close, not even during the COVID-19-fueled e-commerce boom.

In 2021, after Jumia’s share price unexpectedly spiked to $65, it sold into the enthusiasm, raising $573 million across two share sales, more than twice what it had raised around its IPO.

Suddenly flush with cash, Jumia decided to spend its way to the customer and order growth shareholders wanted to see.

Sure enough, it grew active customers and the number of orders, but it was a pyrrhic victory. Operating loss reached $240.9 million in 2021, and its net loss in 2022 was $238.3 million.

I wrote in July 2026:

“There is a pattern here of Jumia becoming disciplined when its back is against the wall. When money is scarce, it cuts employees, closes businesses, exits markets and discovers efficiency. When money is abundant, it has historically found new ways to spend it. That is the context in which Dufay’s latest profitability promise should be understood.”

On this week’s second-quarter earnings call, Francis Dufay, who took the KPI-heavy job in November 2022, reiterated the promise of “Q4 breakeven” six times.

He also highlighted an important decision:

“We deliberately chose to protect our margins and unit economics in this uncertain environment rather than chase GMV at the expense of profitability.”

On the equity fundraise, he shared:

“We also chose not to go for crazy amounts, right? I think the $50 million amount is useful for us. It strengthens the balance sheet. But we also try to be mindful of dilution for our shareholders.”

A better Jumia

Jumia employed 1,770 people at the end of June, down 59% from 4,318 when Dufay arrived. In Q2, technology costs fell 2%, while general and administrative expenses excluding share-based compensation fell 5%.

This is not merely a smaller Jumia. Revenue grew 14% to $52 million while operating loss narrowed 25% to $12.4 million.

After fulfilment, sales and advertising costs, Jumia retained approximately $1.98 per order, up from $1.79 a year ago. That still had to cover $9 million in technology costs and $15.2 million in general and administrative expenses. Breakeven will happen when the contribution from millions of orders can carry those largely fixed costs.

Doorstep delivery remains a minority service, with 75% of shipped packages fulfilled through pickup stations. Increasingly, Jumia looks like someone in Okene or Abakaliki ordering online, waiting a few days and collecting the package from a pickup station. As one Notadeepdive reader put it, Jumia is inventing post offices from first principles.

Advertising revenue, historically pitiable, rose 88% to $3.5 million; food delivery players must be on the sidelines taking notes.

Chinese and Turkish sellers sold 5.8 million items through Jumia during the quarter. They paid commissions and bought services such as warehousing, helping Jumia generate another $1.9 million in value-added services revenue.

Adding customers will not be enough. Jumia increasingly needs advertising, warehousing, and other marketplace services to become serious revenue engines.

THE REAL ORIGIN OF INTERSWITCH

In 2002, Nigeria had roughly 90 banks. 7 of them offered ATM services. The whole country had 68 ATMs and about 1,800 POS terminals for 120 million people, and a transfer took three days to settle.

In the third episode of Africa Built, we discuss the origins of Interswitch. This episode traces the company from the engineers who built Nigeria’s first bank networks in the 1980s to the December 2010 exit of the founding consortium.

Listen Now

Shifting the goalposts

Until February, Jumia’s published promise was loss-before-income-tax breakeven in Q4 2026, followed by full-year profitability in 2027.

It then made adjusted EBITDA its “primary profitability metric for guidance.” Q4 breakeven now means adjusted EBITDA breakeven; 2027 profitability means full-year adjusted EBITDA profitability. Jumia also added explicit positive-cash-flow targets for both periods.

The accounting hurdle became easier, and the cash-flow promise restores some of the rigour.

The distinction is worth $9.3 million; Jumia’s H1 2026 adjusted EBITDA loss was $19.4 million, against a $28.7 million loss before tax.

Jumia can therefore reach adjusted EBITDA breakeven while still reporting a statutory loss. The achievement would matter, but it would not be profit.

The profitability target was not the only one to move. Jumia cut its full-year GMV growth guidance from 27%–32% to 20%–30%, largely due to phones and electronics.

Phones account for 10%–20% of GMV, while other electronics account for slightly more than 20%.

A global shortage of memory chips and CPUs, compounded by disrupted Gulf air freight, has squeezed the roughly $100 smartphones common in Jumia’s markets and kept prices high. The old Jumia might have subsidised those phones to keep GMV looking good.

Phones and electronics are also among Jumia’s worst categories. Its take rate on smartphones is only 4%–6%, so a $200 phone produces very little revenue.

Twenty $10 household orders produce the same GMV, but more marketplace fees, advertising demand and opportunities for repeat purchases. The guidance cut exposes how much of Jumia’s historical scale came from a middling category.

The $50 million question

Jumia ended June with $48.3 million in liquidity after burning $14.3 million during the quarter. At that rate, it had approximately three and a half quarters of liquidity left. Current liabilities exceeded current assets by $11.6 million, while shareholders’ equity had fallen from $25.7 million in December to just $367,000.

Jumia was not out of cash, but it had little room for another bad quarter.

Jumia therefore agreed to sell 9.1 million new ADSs for $50 million. At $5.52 each, they were priced below the stock’s previous 52-week low. IFC supplied half the money; existing shareholder Axian and other investors supplied the rest.

The new shares dilute existing holders by approximately 7% and roughly double Jumia’s liquidity before fees and Q3 cash consumption.

Dufay said Jumia did not need the money to reach breakeven. It would use the additional room for inventory, selected categories and marketing.

Dufay has passed this test once. Jumia raised $94.7 million in August 2024 without returning to its old habits, and its operating cash outflow fell the following year. The $50 million gives him another chance to show that Jumia can remain disciplined on its path to adjusted EBITDA breakeven and positive cash flow. If both arrive in Q4, Jumia will have earned the asterisk in the headline. Profit will still have to wait.

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Zaccheus the tax collector wants 30% of your Crypto Profits

“Pay me in Bitcoin or get fined” - Tywin Lannister probably

A few headlines:

• 🦄We have a new unicorn - Mobility Fintech Startup has completed its latest $250 million funding round, valuing it at $2.1 billion. We wrote about Moove last year here and here

• 🕊️RIP to the Speculator - Victor Niederhoffer, pioneer of Quant statistical arbitrage, and Father of Aubrey Niederhoffer, the founder of Swoop, passed away this week at 82. Read about Victor and Swoop here

Hello there,

The Nigeria Revenue Service published its virtual asset tax guidelines on 31 July 2026, defining 6 categories and 16 taxable events.

The headline rates are 1.5% stamp duty on on-ramps and off-ramps. 1% withholding tax, 7.5% VAT, 10% on staking.

What does this all mean for my favourite fictional character Mama Nkechi and her crypto holdings?

Mama Nkechi imports phone accessories and has a supplier in Shenzhen. Every 6 weeks or so, an invoice arrives on WhatsApp/Wechat for her to pay. For the last 3 years, the invoice has hovered around $10K to $15K per order.

Because bank wires from Nigeria to China would typically take 3-5 days to settle, costing her an unexplainable percentage every time, she decided to start using crypto to settle this trade.

She sends Naira to a P2P desk, receives USDT, and forwards it to her supplier’s wallet address. She has been doing this since 2023, and end-to-end, it takes her about 40 minutes

In the next 6 weeks, Mama Nkechi will have to make payment for another invoice.

This is how the new tax policy changes everything for her:

Stamp duty

The Nigeria Tax Act charges duty on TOKEN to FIAT and FIAT to TOKEN transfers. The circular sets the rate at 1.5%. The duty is withheld in token units. It is borne by the transferee. And the fiat consideration is not reduced by it.

This means the next time Mama Nkechi wants to make a payment of $10K, she needs to trade for the Naira equivalent of $10,150 to account for the 1.5% stamp duty, before making payment to her supplier.

Should Mama Nkechi also receive payments from her customers in crypto, she needs to start factoring in the 1.5% in her price because whenever she off-ramps to Naira via her P2P supplier or exchange provider of choice, these duties must be collected.

Either traders and exchanges start marking up every transaction by 1.5% or every crossing between Naira and tokens inside Nigeria shaves another 1.5% off the token side infinitely.

Multiply Mama Nkechi by every small importer in Nigeria running the same route, and you have a levy on the country’s informal foreign exchange settlement layer.

She buys a little USDT every month to hold dollars

She moves ₦100,000 into USDT every month, 12 times a year.

Stamp Duty: 1.5% on each conversion, withheld in tokens. She pays ₦100,000 and receives ₦98,500 worth of USDT. That is ₦1,500 a month, ₦18,000 a year.

Withholding Tax: None. Stablecoins are Category 2, and the circular says no withholding applies on their disposal.

Her annual bill: ₦18,000 on ₦1.2 million saved. All of it duty, none of it tax on profit.

This is the largest group of Nigerian crypto users. People who are traders, protecting savings from the Naira devaluation, now have to pay 1.5% for the privilege each time.

She bought ₦1 million of Bitcoin, and it doubled

She buys ₦1 million of BTC. Stamp duty takes 0.015 BTC, so she holds 0.985 BTC.

Price doubles. She sells for ₦1.97 million.

Stamp duty at entry: ₦15,000.

Withholding at exit: 1% of gross proceeds, so about ₦19,700, taken in the token she sold.

Income tax: Her gain is ₦970,000. The first ₦800,000 of annual gains is exempt. The remaining ₦170,000 falls in the 15% band, so ₦25,500.

Total: about ₦60,200 on a ₦970,000 gain. Roughly 6.2%.

She bought ₦10 million of Bitcoin, and it doubled

Same trade, at a bigger scale.

Stamp duty at entry: ₦150,000.

Withholding at exit: 1% of ₦19.7 million, about ₦197,000.

Income tax: Gain of ₦9.7 million. Deduct the ₦800,000 exemption to leave ₦8.9 million. The next ₦2.2 million runs at 15%, giving ₦330,000. The remaining ₦6.7 million runs at 18%, giving ₦1,206,000. Total ₦1,536,000.

Her ₦197,000 withholding is credited against that, leaving ₦1,339,000 to pay at filing.

Total: About ₦1,686,000 on a ₦9.7 million gain. Roughly 17.4%.

Reason: The tax bands keep climbing: 21%, then 23%, then 25% above ₦50 million of gains. Individuals top out at 25%. Companies pay a flat 30%.

She is paid in USDT by a foreign client

Her invoice is $2,000 a month.

Income tax: Fees received in virtual assets are valued at their dollar fair market value on the date of receipt, converted to Naira at the CBN/NAFEM rate. Her client is offshore and will not withhold, so she has to self-assess on her annual return(LOL)

VAT: Where the payer is non-resident, the recipient accounts for VAT on the professional fees in Naira. Most Nigerian freelancers taking foreign work in stablecoins have never done this. Read that row of the table carefully.

Cashing out: You are selling USDT for Naira, which makes you the transferee of the fiat, not of the token. The stamp duty falls on whoever buys your USDT. No withholding on stablecoin disposals.

Her bill: Income tax at her tax band on roughly ₦33 million a year, plus VAT on her fees.

Her brother sends you money from London

He sends USDT. She sells it for Naira.

Withholding tax: None. Stablecoin. (If she receives Bitcoin though, withholding tax applies)

Stamp duty: Falls on the transferee of the token, meaning whoever buys the USDT from her, not her.

Her Bill: Nothing, statutorily

In practice, the exchange or the P2P counterparty will price their 1.5% into the rate she is quoted, so she will bear some of it.

She stakes crypto for yield

Let’s say she holds ₦5 million of ETH and stakes it at roughly 3%.

Rewards: ₦150,000 a year, taxable as income at the moment she receives it, valued at dollar fair market value on the date of receipt.

Withholding: 10% where distributed by a licensed provider, so ₦15,000, taken in the token she received.

Income tax: The ₦150,000 goes into her income for the year at your applicable band.

What of the Exchange Providers?

For Exchange providers, you now have responsibility according to the policy, such as:

You are now a collection agent: You withhold in token units, on two different legs, at two different rates. Stamp duty comes off the token credited to the buyer. Withholding comes off the token being sold. On a swap, it comes off whatever the user gave up.

You hold public money in a wallet: Withheld tokens go to NRS in the originating token, with no Naira conversion. Stamp duty must reach them by the 15th and the 30th of the month of transaction. Between withholding and remittance, you are holding a revenue authority’s tokens, which is a custody question before it is an engineering one.

You have to track cost base in dollars, per user, per lot: Token, quantity net of duty, dollar price at the timestamp, exchange rate at the timestamp, acquisition date. FIFO by default. Weighted average only if the user elects it at the start and never switches. This is the longest build in the whole circular and the least likely to exist in your schema today.

Every user must be onboarded with a Tax ID: VASPs and P2P escrow operators must make a valid Tax ID a precondition for account activation, under section 8 of the Tax Administration Act. No Tax ID, no account. Tax registration now has to be wired into exchange onboarding.

Your users will trade less: A round trip through your platform now carries roughly 2.5% in frictional tax before anyone counts a gain.

Fines: ₦10 million for the first month of non-compliance, ₦1 million every month after. 40% of anything you fail to deduct. If you deducted and did not remit, the amount plus 10% per annum plus policy rate interest.

This time it’s different

This is the second attempt. The Finance Act 2023 put 10% on gains from digital assets, and enforcement went nowhere.

The difference this time is that nobody is asking you to volunteer. The exchange withholds before you see the money, and the exchange cannot open your account without a Tax ID.

Credit where it’s due, the circular is an end-to-end researched project that tries to block and account for every potential loophole, enabling the Nigerian Revenue Service to achieve its goals.

They also refuse to tax devaluation by using the dollar-referenced gain clause, which says

When you dispose of a crypto asset, your gain is computed in dollars first. Dollar cost base at acquisition, dollar proceeds at disposal, dollar gain. Only that dollar figure gets converted to Naira at the CBN/NAFEM rate on the day you sold.

Let’s say Mama Nkechi buys at ₦1 million when the rate is ₦1,000 to the Dollar, and sells at ₦1.97 million when it is ₦1,500.

Naira arithmetic says she gained ₦970,000. NRS assesses ₦470,000. The other ₦500,000 is the currency falling, and they let it go.

Compared to how banks faced the windfall tax on FX gain income, the tax authority here has admitted that most Naira-denominated gains are artificially manufactured, and has declined to tax those gains (for now).

What Next for Zaccheus?

The NRS still needs to share communication on its plans for a token treasury, and a list of tokens they will accept.

Meanwhile, the SEC also doubled the VASP capital requirement to ₦2 billion in January, and only a handful of firms hold Approval-in-Principle. The correct collection and implementation of these policies will apply to only a handful of companies, which leads me to ask what this means for neobanks who have stablecoin capabilities, and crypto infrastructure providers?

The Nigeria Revenue Service is about to become a holder of digital assets. It will need custody. It will need a disposal policy. It will be exposed to the price of whatever tokens Nigerians happen to be trading, which means it now has a balance sheet position in Bitcoin volatility whether it wants it or not.

No other tax authority has done this. Most jurisdictions require conversion to fiat before remittance precisely to avoid inheriting the price risk. They think conversion friction is a bigger problem.

The only argument I can find for this is that requiring a VASP to convert every withheld token to Naira before remitting would push enormous volume through the FX market for no revenue purpose.

If that is the case, there’s only one way to end this.

“Zaccheus, what is your wallet address?”

** The Opinions shared here are the independent analysis of the author and do not represent the views of any organisation they may be affiliated with. Nothing in this opinion piece should be regarded as Tax, Legal, Financial, or Regulatory advice.

Please do your own research and engage licensed practitioners wherever necessary.

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Fourfold

It was written in the stars that when Nigeria finally got around to taxing crypto, it wouldn’t be able to resist a touch of greed.

Nigeria has never particularly liked crypto. In 2021, the Central Bank ordered banks to stop facilitating crypto transactions and close accounts linked to them.

The restrictions were partly relaxed in December 2023, and while Banks could now open accounts for licensed crypto businesses, they still could not hold or trade crypto.

Two months later, as the naira sank to new lows after a free float, the government detained two Binance executives who had travelled to Nigeria for meetings, and brought tax-evasion and money-laundering cases against the company. Binance, the claim said, had contributed to currency problems by providing a market where the naira could be traded while dollars were scarce.

But the relationship has since warmed. On July 31, Nigeria’s love story with crypto extended to guidelines for taxing virtual assets.

The new guidelines are so grabby, it would make Zaccheus, the biblical taxman (and the namesake of Nigeria’s current tax chief), blush.

Per the guidelines, if you sell Bitcoin for naira on a Nigerian exchange, that transaction can produce four tax claims.

The guidelines go further. In one example, someone buys two Ether for $3,000 and later swaps them for 0.1 Bitcoin when the Ether are worth $4,000.

The NRS treats the Ether as sold for $4,000, producing a $1,000 gain, even though the person owned crypto before the trade and crypto afterwards. That gain is converted to naira at the official exchange rate and taxed. The Bitcoin is treated as having cost $4,000, which becomes the starting point for calculating the next gain.

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The exchange must also withhold 1% of the two Ether being disposed of, or 0.02 ETH, and send it to an NRS-controlled wallet. At the prices in the example, the government receives $40 worth immediately and will still collect VAT from the exchange’s fee. The only mercy is that the 1.5% stamp duty does not apply because no fiat currency (naira) is in the trade.

With the withholding tax, two Ether for 0.1 Bitcoin is really 2.02 Ether for 0.1 Bitcoin: two Ether for the swap and 0.02 ETH for the NRS. The guidelines do not say whether that 0.02 ETH comes on top of the trade or out of the two Ether being exchanged.

The NRS has effectively made crypto exchanges tax collectors, requiring them to deduct taxes from users’ trades and send the money to the government.

It’s unclear whether that’s the intention, but the guidelines incentivise users to avoid exchanges altogether. A peer-to-peer trade can happen outside the NRS’s view, and anyone deliberately sidestepping an exchange is unlikely to declare that trade in their tax filing.

Nigeria’s 2021 banking restrictions already pushed crypto trading towards P2P markets. The new rules may push even more activity there.

Everyone and their daddy now uses stablecoins for cross-border payments. An importer converts naira into USDT and pays a supplier in China. Businesses do not necessarily care about crypto, but they care that stablecoins provide something resembling dollar access and speed.

Under the guidelines, a Nigerian business that converts naira into stablecoins to make a cross-border payment will pay 1.5% stamp duty on the conversion. The intermediary must deduct the 1.5% stamp duty from the stablecoins before sending the balance overseas.

A company expecting to make $5,000 of gross profit from a $100,000 shipment would surrender roughly $1,523 while paying the supplier. That is more than 30% of its expected gross profit before shipping, customs, storage, salaries, and the small matter of selling the goods. It can absorb the cost, persuade the supplier to accept less, or pass it to Nigerian customers.

A company moving $100,000 every month would pay roughly $18,274 a year in stamp duty alone, before exchange spreads, platform fees, and VAT on those fees.

The biblical Zacchaeus promised to repay fourfold anyone he had cheated after meeting Jesus. These guidelines have yet to find theirs.

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Everyone is in the Arena

Stephen A. Smith is the highest-paid basketball analyst in the world. Depending on whose figures you believe, ESPN will pay him around $100 million over five years to talk about sports.

He never played in the NBA. In his final season at college, he averaged 1.5 points per game, a statistic the internet has used as a running joke for over two decades. In a colorful career on television, he has feuded with LeBron James, Bronny James, Kyrie Irving, Jaylen Brown, Zion Williamson and Kevin Durant.

In a business full of Hall of Famers, championship-winning coaches and former executives on television, the most influential voice in basketball is a man who never played it professionally.

Despite this, Smith likes to remind players that the media attention they resent makes their enormous contracts possible. Charles Barkley, who earned about $40 million during his 16-year career, has pointed out that teams now hand $300 million to “bums.”

While it all sounds like two rich broadcasters being rude to younger rich people, it is also broadly how basketball makes money.

Fans watch games, and networks pay the NBA for the right to air them. The league shares the television money with teams who channel it towards salaries.

The 48-minute game is the main event, but the feuds, interviews, podcasts, and television content keep people interested between games. ESPN pays Stephen A. because he can attract an audience, and downstream of that is revenue for $300 million contracts.

This brings us, unfortunately, to another media-versus-man-in-the-arena argument.

Conversations are part of the product.

Building a market requires people to care. If a startup builds a product, they need people to write about it, argue, or constructively tear it apart.

Last week, GoLemon announced that it was shutting down, and the Nigerian technology ecosystem reacted accordingly. Customers shared stories about a product they loved while others explained why they had stopped using it. Operators broke down the economics of grocery delivery while journalists revisited GoLemon’s journey and the wider venture-backed logistics market. Newsletter writers published post-mortems and consultants offered strategies nobody requested. Instagram reels gave us reflections and hot takes.

These reflections ranged from thoughtful to lazy to blaming the economy and government to being flat-out wrong.

Predictably, founders, friends of founders, investors, and those who dub themselves the ‘men in the arena’ (from the famous Teddy Roosevelt speech) logged on. They objected that people who have never built companies have no right to analyse those who have, a.k.a, talk is cheap.

Building a company is hard work, and watching years of work reduced to a lazy LinkedIn post must suck, but this default response to criticism and commentary is equally as lazy.

We complain about Apple, GTBank, OpenAI, X, and Google all the time. Human beings work there, and some have devoted twenty years of their lives to these companies. The difference is that most people cannot send Tim Cook a WhatsApp message or run into Sam Altman at a technology conference.

Yet, because we know startup founders in Nigeria, can reach them and may need a favour from them one day, their companies are supposed to sit outside the normal range of public commentary. Familiarity must become immunity.

Paying customers are allowed to have opinions about the companies taking their money. Employees are allowed to discuss the places where they spend most of their waking hours, and investors are allowed to ask what happened to their capital. Journalists should examine companies that want customers, funding, regulatory concessions and flattering profiles when things are going well.

A founder obviously has more at stake than someone firing off a LinkedIn post from the safety of their office. The founder’s explanation carries more weight, but it does not mean everyone else is sitting in the stands eating popcorn.

One of the biggest stories from the World Cup was Cabo Verde’s 40-year-old goalkeeper Vozinha, who made seven saves in a 0–0 draw with Spain.

During the game, the Brazilian broadcaster CazéTV began asking viewers to follow Vozinha on Instagram. He went from roughly 50,000 followers before the match to nearly 10 million within 24 hours and almost 30 million by the end of the tournament.

Five days later, Curaçao’s Eloy Room made 15 saves against Ecuador, setting the World Cup record for most saves completed in 90 minutes. Room produced the better single performance of the tournament, yet his Instagram following grew to a modest 800K on the same day as the match.

The difference in outcomes here is thanks to media narratives and commentary around both individual performances.

That is not a flaw in the media. It is how the media works everywhere, in sports, entertainment, business, politics. MI Abaga said it best.

“If nobody talks about you, then you are nobody.”

Being talked about is one of the costs of building something that hopes to attract paying customers. The attention that brings users, investors, and glowing profiles will occasionally bring criticism, mockery, and people who confidently misunderstand the business.

The right to comment is not a licence to be careless.

A useful post-mortem should explain what happened, show evidence and distinguish what is known from what the writer is guessing. Founders should correct false claims, and commentators should accept those corrections. Personal attacks and cruelty add nothing.

Every space needs its NBA Twitter, Football Twitter, Stephen A. Smiths, and Fabrizio Romanos to complement its Ernie Johnsons and David Ornsteins, and they have to coexist with the product that attracts viewership, paying customers, and analysts.

Super fans, haters, professional talking heads, podcasters, newsletter writers, consultants, armchair quarterbacks, quality and poor commentary can exist side by side, with the entrepreneurs in the arena, but silence, cruelty, laziness, personal attacks, and policing of speech on both sides does not advance the space when issues are had.

My bias is to employees, and whenever people invoke the arena, they rarely mean the people who spent years building the company beside them.

When GoLemon announced its shutdown, one of the applaudable things the founders did was publicly recommend their team for new roles.

Those employees were also in the arena, as were the customers.

Nothing but respect to people in the arena.

All of them.

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The money is not in delivery

One of the most underrated things about a physical supermarket is that the customer does most of the hard work.

You walk to the store, browse the shelves, pick items, and join a queue to pay. If you’re at one of those new-age stores, you might even have to pay for the shopping bag. When you’re done paying, you carry all that stuff to the car and then into your house.

Despite all this activity, a physical supermarket only manages the in-store experience, ceding pickup and last-mile delivery to the customer.

A grocery delivery company, on the other hand, will recreate your shopping experience while you lounge at home or deliver shareholder value at work. It can do this in three broad ways:

(a) The asset-light marketplace owns no inventory, stores or warehouses. It plugs into existing retailers such as Bokku, Addide and Ebeano, then uses shoppers, store employees and gig drivers to deliver orders. This is Instacart and the grocery businesses in Uber Eats and DoorDash. The model requires less capital and can enter new locations quickly. The tradeoff is that the startup has limited control over prices and product quality.

(b) Quick commerce / dark stores own small warehouses called dark stores, stock a few thousand products, and deliver within a two-to-three-kilometre radius. The promise is usually 10–30-minute delivery for small, frequent orders. This is Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart in India. It is also the model that produced Gorillas, Gopuff and much of the Western quick-commerce graveyard.

(c) The vertically integrated online supermarket is built for planned, large-basket shopping. The company buys and stores inventory, manages quality, picks orders and arranges delivery from one or more fulfilment centres. Ocado, Jüsto in Mexico and Nigeria’s GoLemon fit here.

Each configuration begins with a set of assumptions about what will make the numbers work.

The five assumptions

The first is that large baskets can carry the cost of delivery.

A ₦2,000 order with a ₦500 delivery fee leaves little after paying the rider. A larger basket produces more gross profit while the delivery cost remains almost the same. But bigger baskets take longer to pick, require more packaging, and may need larger vehicles.

The second assumption is that the company will find enough orders in a small area before it runs out of money.

Density means orders concentrated in space and time. It keeps warehouse workers busy, allows drivers to carry or route multiple orders, and spreads rent, salaries, and electricity across more customers.

This was GoLemon’s decisive bet, and at its second anniversary, the company said it had delivered about ₦2.5 billion worth of groceries. Using the ₦43,700 average basket it disclosed to TechCabal this week, that works out to roughly 57,000 orders over two years, or about 80 daily on average. Its later run rate was likely higher, but the figure shows the scale of the challenge.

Swiggy’s Instamart averaged 1,093 orders per dark store per day in the first three months of 2026 and still lost about $90.8 million at adjusted EBITDA. Across 112.6 million orders, that was a loss of roughly $0.81 per order. Its contribution loss after variable costs was much smaller at about $0.13 per order, showing how close a business can get without actually covering its full cost base.

Instamart and GoLemon served different shopping habits, so there is no universal number of orders at which a warehouse becomes profitable. Store size, basket size, rent, delivery radius and product mix all matter. The common requirement is to spread infrastructure cost across thousands of orders.

The third assumption is that customers will pay full cost for delivery.

Even in rich countries, many customers do not pay the full cost. Delivery fees are waived, discounted, or spread across memberships and service charges. The company then depends on the gross profit from the basket to subsidise picking and delivery, which makes basket size important again.

The fourth assumption is that grocery order frequency will produce valuable, long-term customers.

People buy groceries every week. Win a customer once, keep them for years, so a high acquisition cost seems reasonable. Jumia made a similar bet when it operated food delivery.

Yet the lifetime value calculation only works if the customer stays. Grocery shoppers can split their baskets across several stores, follow discounts, and abandon an app after repeated substitutions or out-of-stock items. High frequency does not automatically produce loyalty.

The fifth assumption is that removing middlemen will produce better prices and higher margins.

Jüsto and GoLemon figure they could source directly from farms and manufacturers, capture some of the intermediaries’ margin, pass some to customers as lower prices and keep the rest.

FEMSA’s investment thesis for Jüsto argued that vertical integration would remove intermediaries and produce fresher food, higher margins and a better customer experience.

Every removed middleman, however, becomes a job for the startup to handle. Supplier relationships, procurement, quality control, inventory management, warehousing, spoilage, picking and delivery. There is no free lunch.

GoLemon did all the work

GoLemon sourced groceries from farms and manufacturers, ran a warehouse and processing centre, managed quality control and built cold-chain capacity for perishables. It also operated the technology for customers to order and arranged delivery to their homes.

It acquired inventory, tying cash up in stock and absorbing the risk that fresh produce would spoil. Supplier prices kept changing in an inflationary economy while its customer proposition promised consistently low prices. That made the business a working-capital machine.

GoLemon told TechCabal that its average order produced a positive contribution after direct costs, although the result varied with basket size, product mix, distance, fulfilment volume and the presence of fresh produce.

That meant GoLemon could buy, pick and deliver an individual basket without losing money on that transaction. It still needed enough of those baskets to pay for warehouses, engineers, supply-chain staff, electricity and the rest of the organisation.

Contribution-positive orders were not enough. GoLemon needed contribution-positive orders at scale.

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The other side of the basket

Grocery delivery companies have two routes to survival. They can make fulfilment/delivery progressively cheaper, or they can find another large revenue source.

The first route rewards density, large baskets, efficient picking, short delivery distances, and partnerships that keep fixed costs low. Patient capital can buy the company time to reach that density, but the economics have to improve as orders increase.

GoLemon began splitting the work with Chowdeck in December 2025, supplying groceries to Chowdeck’s dark stores and handling sourcing and quality control. Chowdeck listed selected products inside its app, managed the dark stores, and completed instant deliveries. GoLemon continued serving planned, large-basket orders through its own platform.

The partnership reduced duplication, but it introduced another trade-off. Chowdeck owned the frequent customer interaction, checkout, and instant-delivery data so GoLemon increasingly supplied the groceries for someone else’s interface.

That matters because the best grocery businesses eventually make money from more than groceries.

Instacart generated $1.065 billion from advertising and other revenue in 2025, almost entirely from ads. That was 28.5% of its total revenue and about 2.9% of the $37.2 billion spent through its platform. Its grocery transactions created an audience of shoppers, and brands paid to influence their decision-making.

At Instacart’s mature advertising rate (forgive this tenuous mathematics!), GoLemon’s cumulative ₦2.5 billion of grocery sales would have produced roughly ₦71 million in advertising revenue over two years. That would not have supported warehouses and some employees.

Yet ads cannot rescue an “undense” grocery business because density creates the surface area for an advertising business in the first place.

The same principle applies to subscriptions, private labels, software and financial services. Each becomes more valuable as the platform aggregates more customers, purchases and data. The delivery gets the order to the customer, but the repeated shopping habit creates the profit pools around it.

TL;DR: Grocery delivery is a low-margin retail business with an expensive fulfilment layer attached. Scale makes that layer cheaper. The real money comes from everything the shopping habit eventually makes possible.

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Two chances

On Monday, 23 April 1984, Maj. Gen Muhammadu Buhari’s second-in-command, Brigadier Tunde Idiagbon, announced that Nigeria was changing the colors of its naira notes. The exchange of old notes for the new would begin at 8 a.m. on Wednesday and end at 6 p.m. on Sunday, 6 May. During that window, all land borders would be closed.

80 million Nigerians had twelve days to exchange almost every old note they had. With barely 1,240 bank branches nationwide, people abandoned offices and market stalls to join queues; in places without banks, they handed their savings to local government officials operating under armed supervision.

Anyone presenting more than ₦5,000—around forty months’ minimum-wage earnings—in old notes had to have a High Court affidavit explaining where the money came from and three passport photographs.

By October 1984, Buhari credited the exercise with reducing money supply and restoring confidence in the naira. The CBN’s figures showed a temporary victory; currency outside banks fell from ₦4.84 billion in December 1983 to ₦3.60 billion by June, and by September, it was back at ₦4.65 billion, recovering most of the fall within three months.

Thirty-nine years later, Buhari tried again, backing another redesign to pull cash into banks.

Instead, the 2022 cash redesign engineered the worst cash shortage in Nigeria’s peacetime history. Within two months, currency in circulation fell by more than two-thirds, upending trade and forcing anyone who could to switch to transfers and digital payments.

For more than two months, Nigerians slept outside ATMs and paid as much as ₦1,000 in fees to withdraw ₦5,000; traders lost sales, farmers watched produce spoil, commuters could not pay fares, and hospitals struggled to buy supplies or treat patients.

Godwin Emefiele, who proposed and ran the redesign policy, is on trial over how it was approved and executed. He has denied all the charges, and Buhari, who approved the policy and defended it through the worst of the cash scarcity, died in July 2025.

In May 2026, Nigerians held ₦5.19 trillion outside banks, representing 91.3 percent of all currency in circulation. Electronic payments have grown, but cash has returned alongside them.

PoS agents, the villains of the cash crunch, have become an even more crucial part of the financial system.

A number called hoarding

To justify a currency redesign in 2022, Emefiele cited a shortage of clean banknotes, advances in counterfeiting technology and the security situation. Redesigning the naira, he said, would reduce the cash available for ransom payments, reinforce the cashless economy and make monetary policy more effective.

Emefiele said ₦2.73 trillion of Nigeria’s ₦3.23 trillion in circulation was outside commercial banks. He called it a “worrisome trend” and evidence of hoarding.

The figure could not distinguish hoarded cash from money held by households and businesses for daily transactions. Currency in circulation had doubled since 2015, but Nigeria’s money supply had nearly tripled. Cash had fallen from 7.8 percent of it to 7 percent.

The counterfeiting argument for a currency redesign rested on the CBN’s currency operations report, which recorded thirteen counterfeit notes per million banknotes examined in 2020, down from twenty in 2019. Their total face value was ₦56.8 million, or one naira in every fifty-seven thousand in circulation.

Eleven years against cash

The CBN piloted a cashless policy in Lagos in January 2012, imposing processing charges on withdrawals above ₦500,000 for individuals and ₦3 million for companies, while encouraging cards, transfers and other electronic payments. The policy aimed to reduce, not eliminate, the amount of physical cash in the economy.

Cash is expensive to print, transport, sort and secure; it also makes corruption and money laundering easier.

Some parts of this campaign worked because they produced useful alternatives. The Nigeria Instant Payment system enabled near-instant bank transfers while the Bank Verification Number made it easier to identify customers across accounts. The CBN’s 2013 agent-banking framework allowed individuals at corner shops to perform basic banking services in places where opening a branch made little economic sense.

Other alternatives required Nigerians to adopt the CBN’s preferred technology without offering a compelling improvement over products they already had. A year after its launch, the eNaira had yet to move beyond what the IMF described as an initial wave of limited adoption because fintech wallets and mobile-money services already performed many of the functions ordinary users needed.

Cash is a stubborn adversary because it works without electricity or mobile data, and settlement is immediate. It is accepted by a bus conductor or a roadside trader without either party needing to trust each other or a third party.

By 2022, the CBN had spent a decade trying to make electronic payments more attractive and cash more expensive. The currency redesign fused that technocratic campaign with the instrument Buhari’s military government had used in 1984; the CBN would withdraw the money and force Nigerians to adapt.

A controlled shortage

The CBN selected the ₦200, ₦500 and ₦1,000 notes for redesign, which together represented 95.6 percent of the value of all currency in circulation. Nigerians were given from 26 October until 31 January to return them, although the redesigned notes were not scheduled to enter circulation until 15 December.

That left forty-seven days in which old and new notes could circulate together.

On 6 December, before the new notes were released, the CBN added withdrawal limits. Individuals would initially be permitted to withdraw only ₦100,000 a week across counters, ATMs and PoS terminals; companies could take ₦500,000. Following protests, the limits were increased to ₦500,000 and ₦5 million.

The limits showed that the CBN did not intend to just exchange the old stock for an equivalent amount of new cash. It also intended to leave less cash in circulation after the swap.

By 29 January, Emefiele said banks had collected ₦1.9 trillion, with about ₦500 billion still outside the system. The Nigerian Economic Summit Group estimated that only ₦390.3 billion in redesigned notes had been made available by mid-December, against approximately ₦2.9 trillion that were required to replace the withdrawn denominations.

The monetary data showed that currency in circulation fell from ₦3.01 trillion in December 2022 to ₦982.1 billion in February 2023.

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Nigeria’s digital infrastructure had grown quickly, but it had grown around ordinary adoption. It had not been built for the forced migration of an entire cash economy within weeks. Bank applications slowed or failed under the traffic, which was unsurprising given that just about five in ten Nigerian adults had a bank account. Many communities had no nearby bank branch, unreliable mobile coverage and limited access to smartphones. A trader who accepted a transfer might still need cash to pay a supplier, load goods into a vehicle or take a bus home.

As the situation worsened, state governments took the federal government to court. On February 8, the court ordered that the old notes should remain legal tender while it considered the case. Eight days later, Buhari addressed the country and restored only the old ₦200 note. The old ₦500 and ₦1,000 notes, he said, would remain invalid.

On 3 March, the Supreme Court ruled that the policy had been carried out without adequate consultation or reasonable notice and ordered that all three old denominations should circulate with the redesigned notes until the end of the year.

The CBN did not formally direct banks to comply until 13 March. By then, traders refused notes they believed other people might reject and banks were unsure whether to dispense cash the president had declared invalid. A court order did not instantly restore public confidence in accepting them.

The World Bank estimated that non-agricultural, non-oil growth in the first quarter of 2023 could have been two percentage points higher without the redesign. Inflation rose from 21.3 percent in December to 21.9 percent in the first quarter. Bank deposits and broad money continued along their previous trajectory, and banking agents became entrenched in the financial system.

The price of money

A PoS agent has an electronic float in a bank or fintech account, and physical cash.

When a customer wants to withdraw, the customer’s account is debited electronically and the agent hands over cash. When a customer wants to deposit, the agent collects cash and sends its electronic equivalent. The agent’s job is to keep both inventories balanced while earning a fee on each transaction.

Before 2023, the fee was largely for proximity because an agent saved a customer the journey to a bank branch or the queue at an ATM. During the cash crunch, customers had to pay a premium for the cash.

Demand for notes rose at the same time that banks stopped supplying them, forcing agents to source cash from petrol stations, supermarkets, traders and any business that still received it from customers. Some agents paid to get cash and passed the cost to their customers.

The Nigerian Economic Summit Group recorded mark-ups of 20 to 30 percent at the height of the shortage.

PoS agents became easy villains because they were the people visibly collecting the fee, and some understandably exploited the shortage. Yet, the underlying cause of scarcity was the CBN, and the banks that had once distributed cash at no direct price could no longer do so.

The accidental migration

Nigerians made 5.2 billion instant-payment transactions in 2022. In 2023, they made 9.7 billion. The value processed through electronic channels rose from ₦387 trillion to about ₦600 trillion.

Some of this growth would have happened without the redesign because Nigeria’s digital-payment volumes had been rising for years. The cash crunch compressed several years of customer acquisition into a few months and forced millions of transactions onto platforms that had previously been optional.

During the crisis, Lagos phone-accessories merchant Oberry Agamah began using Moniepoint terminals because transfers into her regular bank accounts were slow and unreliable. Customers would show that they had been debited and leave with goods before the money reached her.

Payment companies did not create the shortage, but the shortage delivered them user volume and a national demonstration of their usefulness.

The PoS terminals fintechs supply could be used to pay a merchant electronically, but it was also commonly used to withdraw cash.

A customer transfers money through digital rails so that an agent can hand over banknotes. One half of the transaction is cashless, but the purpose of the transaction is to obtain cash.

The naira redesign made electronic payments indispensable without making cash dispensable, and fintechs succeeded by connecting the two forms of money more reliably than banks did.

What stayed

The PoS terminals banks had subsidised so merchants could accept card payments were the machinery of the cash business.

The terminals have become important enough for the CBN to prescribe where they may operate, how they connect to payment switches and how their owners are identified. The regulator that once treated cash outside bank vaults as evidence of a policy failure now regulates millions of businesses whose central service is distributing that cash.

The CBN has also returned to its older instrument. Since January 2026, individuals withdrawing more than ₦500,000 a week pay a 3 percent charge on the excess while companies pay 5 percent above ₦5 million. Forty percent of the charges go to the CBN and 60 percent to the financial institution processing the withdrawal.

Payment systems that gave Nigerians something better than cash grew; instant transfers were faster than cheques and agents were closer than bank branches.

Policies that relied on making cash unavailable worked only while the pressure remained. Cash outside banks fell after the 1984 swap and recovered within months. It fell more dramatically in 2023 and returned as soon as the old notes were allowed back into circulation.

There is still no public accounting of how much illicit money either exercise exposed. There is no figure showing how much counterfeit currency was prevented from returning or how much unexplained wealth was identified because its owner tried to exchange old notes.

Buhari’s two currency swaps demonstrated the reach of the Nigerian state. In both cases, the government could compel citizens to surrender the money in their possession. It could reduce currency outside banks for as long as it restricted the replacement.

It could not make the need for cash disappear.

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Let’s start a tech publication

Everyone and their daddy believes they should start a tech media publication.

The thinking is that reporters at existing publications don’t have sufficient expertise. Stories miss important context, and most of the analysis is shallow.

So every year or so, people who work in the technology ecosystem toy with the idea of assembling a newsroom of top reporters to produce better work and eventually become the publication.

I have written about the problems with that argument, so I will not rehash them. The more interesting question is what happens after someone assembles that newsroom and has to pay those reporters monthly.

I’ve been thinking about that since reading Techpoint Africa in the last two weeks.

Techpoint was founded in 2015 to explain Nigeria’s nascent technology industry to a wide audience, using office tours, founder profiles and accessible reporting. It has published important stories and built one of the category’s most recognisable brands.

Yet, since at least November 2024, one of its most prolific reporters has been Artificial Intelligence.

PointAI, Techpoint’s AI author, produces news using a mixture of public sources and Techpoint’s data, after which a human reviewer checks the work. At the time of writing, PointAI has 338 articles to its name. That’s almost certainly more stories over the period than any other reporter at the publication.

Techpoint’s masthead lists a five-person editorial team. Chimgozirim Nwokoma, listed as a senior reporter, is now a senior reporter at Condia. Bolu Abiodun, another senior reporter on the masthead, last published on Techpoint in May. Oluwanifemi Kolawole, one of the publication’s longstanding bylines, last published there in December 2024. There are still active human reporters at Techpoint, but it’s likely a tinier team than what an already small masthead suggests.

If the newsroom is small but the story count has not noticeably slipped, then PointAI is worth discussing. AI can write adequate news updates, so that question is settled. But why does a newsroom’s output have to keep the same pace when a smaller newsroom could simply publish less?

In an interview with Communique, Techpoint CEO Muyiwa Mátùlúkò committed to quadrupling Techpoint’s startup coverage over five years. That commitment is a window into how Nigerian tech media works.

An AI byline is an interesting choice for a media publication because credibility is the asset a publication sells or extends to publishers. It builds credibility through the reporters whose names repeatedly appear in bylines and the important stories they produce.

Readers learn which journalists understand a beat and a difficult story carries weight partly because of a reporter’s reputation.

But credibility is expensive, and finding ways to pay for it is work in progress. Big Cabal Media, TechCabal’s parent company, cut 19 per cent of its workforce in 2023.

In a tenth-anniversary account Techpoint published in 2025, a dramatic revenue decline in October 2023 led to salary cuts of up to 70 percent instead of layoffs. The company was still operating at 60 percent capacity well into 2024. In October 2025, its parent company, Businessfront, laid off an undisclosed number of employees, citing long-term sustainability and strategic focus.

The original bargain

Most Nigerian tech publications begin with roughly the same model. Hire a small newsroom, publish every day, build an audience, and then convert the audience into pageviews. They sell those pageviews to advertisers and use the advertising revenue to pay the newsroom, which—stay with me here—produces more stories that attract even more readers.

The model always runs into a set of problems, which are amplified when a publication is niche.

The Nigerian technology audience is valuable but not especially large, so the number of companies with a reason and a budget to advertise to that audience is modest. Programmatic advertising rewards enormous scale, which niche business publications do not have.

Direct advertising pays better, but costs more to sell. You’ll hire salespeople and maintain relationships. Crucially, you’ll need to find a steady supply of companies willing to spend money.

The way out of this problem is expanding the surface area of things a publication can sell.

The publication already knows that website advertising cannot support the newsroom it wants. What it does not know is which adjacent product will. So it launches a newsletter, a podcast, native social video, a research arm, and an events business.

TechCabal’s Moonshot has become an important commercial product. At Semafor, events now produce roughly half of revenue. The company reported $40 million in revenue and $2 million in EBITDA in 2025, its first full year of profitability.

Finding a vertical that works

The problem with expanding the surface area of your publication is that there’s no guarantee you will find something that works quickly.

A podcast needs hosts, production, distribution and a sales proposition before it has an advertiser. Video needs equipment, editors and enough consistent output to learn what audiences want. An event is worse, requiring venue deposits, vendors, programming, sponsor sales and months of staff time before anyone knows whether the room will be filled.

Every new surface for revenue is also a new surface for losses.

Techpoint began hosting events in 2017. ‘Techpoint Inspired’ was followed by ‘Techpoint Build’, town halls, a fintech summit and a blockchain conference. Some became meaningful parts of the brand and attracted sponsorship.

In 2023, the company tried to extend the formula into human resources with Modern Workplace Africa. Mátùlúkò told Communiqué it failed to reach the intended audience and was not profitable. It put its events business on hold the following year.

That experience shows that “events” is not really a business model. A recurring conference with a recognised audience, returning sponsors and an operating team that knows how to deliver it is a business model. The first edition of an event in a new vertical is a bet.

Media is also a herd business. Once one publication proves that a conference, research arm or specialised newsletter can make money, others cluster around the same model. They approach the same sponsors, invite many of the same speakers and compete for the same attendees’ limited time.

What looks like a proven revenue line may still be a bad business for the fifth publication that attempts it.

This herd effect is intensified by how concentrated the pool of buyers is. A publication may have six different products while selling all six to much the same group of banks, telcos, fintechs, venture firms and global technology companies. Diversification on the product side can conceal concentration on the customer side.

Success with an experiment or vertical ironically produces more problems. When one experiment finally succeeds, its profits subsidise the newsroom. It also finances the podcast that has not found an audience, the video unit that has not found a sponsor and the second event that management insists needs one more year.

It’s difficult to know if a failed product is fundamentally bad, mistimed, or poorly executed. Abandoning an experiment is great financial discipline, but it may also mean abandoning the next Moonshot just before it clicks.

Once a company has one profitable product, it can afford to postpone that decision to kill a product. The winner extends the runway of every other loser.

The accounting of newsrooms only compounds the complexity. An event may appear profitable because the reporters who developed its programme, recruited its speakers and attracted its audience are already counted as newsroom costs.

A video unit loses money while making a larger sponsorship package possible. The newsroom acts as marketing for the event, and the event pays for the newsroom. Management is not choosing among a collection of self-contained profit-and-loss statements.

Execution complicates the decision further. Editorial credibility may persuade people to attend the first conference or take a meeting about a research project, but it does not automatically give a publication expertise in venue operations, enterprise sales, sponsor fulfilment, video production or product management. A media company can have the correct strategy and still lose money because it has built five businesses it does not yet know how to operate.

These experiments also draw on the same management attention, sales relationships, and institutional reputation. A poorly executed conference can weaken a sponsor relationship that the newsletter depends on. A podcast without an audience can still consume the editor who should be improving the newsletter. The loss centres do not always sit harmlessly beside the winner; they can make the winner worse.

The challenge, then, is not simply to expand the surface area of things that can be sold. It is to find the money-spinner before the search for it consumes the company and then to decide how many other experiments that money-spinner should be required to carry.

Three jobs, one newsroom

A small editorial team must publish frequently enough to maintain a habit, quickly enough to remain relevant and deeply enough to earn respect. Those are three different jobs.

Daily news has become a commodity that supplies search traffic. But since every publication receives the same press release and watches the same regulator, there is a sameness to daily news.

Analysis is slower. It requires a reporter who has covered a beat long enough to know what is unusual, sources who will explain what is missing from the announcement, and an editor willing to let the article take several days. Investigations are slower and more uncertain. They can consume weeks and end with nothing publishable.

A large publication solves this by having enough reporters to do several things at once. Nigerian tech publications typically ask the same small cast of reporters to perform all these roles.

The daily news obligation wins because tomorrow’s homepage cannot be filled with the investigation that might be ready next month. The newsroom produces the work that keeps the machine alive, even though the work that gives the publication its reputation is the work the machine leaves least time to produce.

Two demand curves

Articles face at least two demand curves: the demand for attention and the demand for payment.

A recent working paper by Gregory Martin, Shoshana Vasserman and Cameron Pfiffer examined four years of activity at a large American metropolitan newspaper: 605 million article visits, 1.2 billion user sessions and more than 55 million paywall encounters.

Soft news produced traffic, but Hard news—local politics, public health and the local economy—produced a greater willingness to pay.

The estimated willingness to pay for the average Local News article was roughly twice that of the average Entertainment article. A newsroom optimised for advertising would allocate staff differently from one optimised for subscriptions.

Yet, the paper found that even the strongest subscription-producing sections could not cover their staffing costs with digital subscription revenue alone.

In Nigeria, the advertising market is thinner, and reader revenue is constrained by incomes, payment friction and the abundance of free alternatives. A niche publication can have a deeply influential audience without having enough people willing and able to pay a recurring subscription that supports a large newsroom.

As we’ve seen with a handful of publications, paywalls can capture more money from loyal readers while shrinking the reach that makes sponsorship attractive. Keeping everything free preserves reach while leaving the publication dependent on advertisers.

That is why arguments about whether Nigerian readers “value journalism” are pointless. Readers can value a product, advertisers can value its audience, and neither will add up to the cost of producing the product at the desired quality and frequency.

Even willingness to pay is not the same thing as willingness to pay enough.

This is why the hunt for a money-spinner is existential and why it often changes what the company sells.

The business behind the publication

Consider an event. On paper, an event is another format for editorial content: interviews happen on a stage rather than in an article. Economically, it is a different product because a sponsor is paying for a room full of potential customers, speaking time for an executive, private access to founders, recruitment leads, product demonstrations and the status of appearing at the centre of an industry conversation.

Research and consulting follow a similar path. A publicly available article gives many readers a general understanding of a market. A commissioned report gives a client an answer to a specific question. The client pays far more because the information is tailored, scarce, and useful to a decision.

Branded content sells production and credibility; executive profiles signal status while awards sell recognition. Each of these surfaces sells a seat near the industry or some version of it. A bank that pays for a keynote slot is not buying an article.

Techpoint’s monthly Pitch Friday meetup began as a community product, but a NAMIP case study says founders who attended later returned as paying sponsors. The event also fed an investor newsletter and the flagship Techpoint Digest. Direct revenue from subscriptions or event tickets was limited; the relationships produced sponsorships and other business opportunities.

TechCabal has built an insights business that offers research and consulting to development institutions, financial institutions, technology companies, startups, governments and investors. Its Moonshot conference sells sponsorship, exhibitions and proximity to the African technology ecosystem. Technext has built conferences around cryptocurrency and financial technology. Across the category, the pattern is that a newsroom creates an audience and a position in the industry; the rest of the company tries to turn that position into something a client can put in a budget.

A good investigation may change how founders behave, help an investor avoid a bad company, give a regulator a clearer picture of an industry, and make thousands of readers better informed. The publication cannot send each beneficiary an invoice but an event can charge a sponsor for a booth.

Journalism creates the asset and access captures the value.

This explains why a profitable Nigerian tech publication often becomes, in economic terms, a market-access company with a newsroom attached.

The website is the public face and underneath it sits a mixture of sponsorship sales, event production, research, data, branded work and corporate relationships. It creates a peculiar internal arrangement where the part of the company with the greatest prestige is not necessarily the part with the highest revenue.

A peculiar tension follows from that arrangement. Editors want reporters to produce work the industry cannot ignore. Commercial teams want products clients will buy this quarter. Management wants the newsroom to publish every day, build the brand, support events, moderate panels, appear in sponsored videos and somehow find time for the investigation that will prove the publication still matters. Even success can feel like losing the argument about what the company was built to do.

The subsidiser has a cycle

I’ve argued before that the industry’s thinness changes editorial relationships. Reporters, founders, investors and communications people know one another, meet in the same rooms and often disagree over whether a story has enough “context.” Context becomes a negotiation over meaning.

The company being covered may be an advertiser, an event sponsor, a research client, a source, and the employer of a future speaker. The publication does not need to promise favourable coverage for the structure to matter. Commercial dependence works through softer channels: which relationship can survive a difficult headline, which sponsor is considered “strategic,” how much senior management time goes into repairing offence, and how quickly an editor learns that a technically defensible story can still create a commercial problem.

In a large market, the loss of one advertiser is painful, but in a thin market, the same loss can remove a meaningful share of an event budget.

It also means technology publications inherit the funding cycle of the industry they cover. When venture money is abundant, startups hire aggressively, launch products, sponsor conferences, buy employer-brand campaigns and pay to be associated with growth. Investors and professional-services firms want access to the same founders. Banks and telcos want to look innovative. The ecosystem’s optimism becomes media revenue.

When funding slows, those budgets are among the easiest to cut. Startups stop buying visibility and start extending runway. Investors need fewer large events to meet founders. Global companies trim local marketing. The publication still has salaries, rent, and the obligation to publish tomorrow morning.

Techpoint’s 2023 experience, a failed vertical and 70 percent salary cuts, shows how these risks converge. Its response was a broader parent company and a new business-media strategy: Finance in Africa, Energy in Africa and Intelpoint alongside Techpoint, modelled in part on the specialist-publication logic of Industry Dive.

A portfolio of publications is only diversified if the customers and revenue cycles are meaningfully different. Otherwise, it is a larger production system resting on adjacent versions of the same corporate budget.

See you next week!

And to OGs, last week’s Notadeepdive was our most-read newsletter ever, but you might have missed it. Check your Promotions or spam folder and, if it landed there, drag it back into Primary so the next one reaches you properly.

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Everyone wants to know about Jumia’s timeline

If I were into “prediction markets” a.k.a betting apps with extra steps, one sure-fire wager is that every time a journalist asks me for a comment, the company they want answers about is Jumia.

“When will Jumia become profitable?” is a favourite question.

“Can it beat Chinese competitors like Temu and Shein?” is another.

These are useful questions, but they are too focused on what Jumia is doing now when much of the answer is buried in its past.

Francis Dufay took over from co-CEOs Jeremy Hodara and Sacha Poignonnec in November 2022. And like several Jumia leaders before him, he arrived promising greater discipline and a credible path to profitability.

By the end of 2020, Hodara and Poignonnec said Jumia had been put “firmly” on track towards breakeven. Marketing spend had fallen, costs were being cut, and the company’s adjusted EBITDA loss was shrinking.

Then Jumia’s share price climbed to an all-time closing high of $65.51 in February 2021. The company sensibly took advantage of the excitement, raising $341.2 million from investors in March. This came only four months after another share sale had raised $231.4 million. In total, Jumia raised $573 million in new money.

Now flush with cash, sales and advertising spending more than doubled, rising from $37.1 million in 2020 to $81.9 million in 2021. Annual active consumers grew by 18%, from 6.8 million to 8 million. But operating loss widened 41% to $240.9 million.

The spending continued into 2022 with another $75.7 million on sales and advertising, while its adjusted EBITDA loss reached $207 million. Hodara and Poignonnec left that November.

There is a pattern here of Jumia becoming disciplined when its back is against the wall. When money is scarce, it cuts employees, closes businesses, exits markets and discovers efficiency. When money is abundant, it has historically found new ways to spend it.

That is the context in which Dufay’s latest profitability promise should be understood.

For now, Jumia is walking the talk. Its headcount has fallen from 4,318 employees at the end of 2022 to just over 1,980 in March 2026. In the first quarter of 2026, GMV grew by 32% after adjusting for exited markets, physical-goods orders grew by 31% and adjusted EBITDA loss fell by 32% to $10.7 million.

Jumia now says it will reach adjusted EBITDA breakeven and positive cash flow in the fourth quarter of 2026, before delivering full-year profitability and positive cash flow in 2027.

The real test is not simply whether Dufay can enforce discipline while Jumia has limited cash. It is whether the discipline survives success. What happens if the share price rises again and management is given room to become ambitious?

There is also a more fundamental question: has Jumia actually expanded the market for online shopping, or has it mostly bought temporary bursts of activity?

In a November 2014 TechCabal article (one of the many gems I found in my research), Feyi Fawehinmi described African ecommerce as “a tough business that is not for the faint of heart.” At the time, only 360,000 people had bought something from Jumia. Nigeria had roughly 170 million people, internet adoption was growing, and yet the appeal of shopping online remained limited.

Jumia has obviously grown since then, partly powered by an extraordinary amount of investor money. But customer growth peaked in 2021 and has trended downwards even as more Nigerians shop online.

Of course it’s worth mentioning that Jumia has exited countries, closed businesses and changed the mix of activity counted on its platform.

Still, the broader question remains. Historically, whenever Jumia placed discipline ahead of expansion, growth slowed. Dufay must prove that discipline can produce efficient growth rather than simply manage decline.

This is why Jumia’s story needs more than a short article or a quick quote to a journalist. Like the story we published last week about Nigeria’s 2008 stock-market crash, it rewards going backwards, following the money and examining the gap between what people said and what they actually did.

But it also demands a different format. So we made a podcast.

A few weeks ago, I shared the first episode of our Jumia series. About 200 people clicked through and listened. Episode two is now out, and I genuinely think it is worth every minute of your time.

You can listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Deezer.

We are going to do much more long-form work over the next year, and your feedback will be essential to what this becomes. It would be fantastic to get this episode to 2,000 listens.

Please listen. And if you enjoy it, give the show a rating, like the episode, or share it with someone who has ever wondered how Jumia managed to spend so much money without becoming profitable.

And if there’s something you hate, your feedback will help make this much better.

It is really entertaining stuff, if I say so myself.

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A money-making opportunity for a generation

In 2007, *Adewole was bent over the day’s newspaper, tracking the closing prices of several publicly listed companies and doing some maths that made him smile. According to the day’s prices, his portfolio was now worth ₦8 million. Two years earlier, he had taken a cautious slice of his pension, the reward for four decades at a public corporation, and put ₦2 million into the market.

He started investing in the stock market almost by accident. His bank, one of the most prominent in the country, was selling shares, and the bank branch had become part of the sales machine. Customers who came in to deposit or withdraw money would be nudged by tellers, account officers, or whoever else was on the banking floor that day to buy shares.

Adewole did not know what a price-to-earnings ratio was or how to assess the strength of a balance sheet. But he trusted his bank, and everyone agreed that stocks were the next big thing.

That Adewole and millions of other Nigerians trusted their banks was quite an achievement.

In the early 90s, “wonder banks” collapsed, taking depositors’ savings with them, and licensed banks had not behaved much better. In January 1998, the Central Bank revoked the licences of 26 banks, including 12 commercial banks because of their “grave financial conditions.”

In January 2006, eighteen months before Adewole sat smiling over his newspaper, the CBN closed 14 more banks that had failed to raise a ₦25 billion capital requirement. The banks that met the new capital requirements emerged with glass towers, new logos, and full-page newspaper ads inviting Nigerians to own a piece of the financial future. For a retiree like Adewole, the pitch was hard to resist, especially once bank stocks began their bull run.

Seasoned investors were more reluctant. They knew a different market where you bought stocks you recognised, kept the certificates somewhere safe, and waited for dividends. This new market would take some getting used to.

First, the banks needed money

On July 6, 2004, Charles Soludo, one month into his term as Central Bank Governor, told the Bankers’ Committee in Abuja that Nigeria’s 89 banks had 18 months to have at least ₦25 billion of their own money as shareholders’ funds (the cushion that protects depositors’ savings from bad loans). The old requirement was ₦2 billion, and most banks did not even have that.

To survive, 89 banks would need to raise ₦2.2 trillion. The only way out for the laggards who couldn’t dream of raising such sums was a merger.

Soludo believed that Nigeria didn’t have banks big enough for its economy.

The oil boom of the 2000s created billion-dollar energy projects, and Nigerian banks were too small to lead the financing, leaving foreign lenders like BNP Paribas, Citibank, and WestLB to profit from the economic expansion.

Yet, Soludo also understood what happens when you order 89 banks to find ₦25 billion each in 18 months. Some would raise real money, but others would try to cut corners. So he promised a “risk-focused, rule-based regulatory framework” in which arbitrariness would be “reduced to the barest minimum.” The Central Bank would publish the names of qualifying banks on December 31, 2005, verify every naira raised, and punish operators who broke the rules.

The recapitalisation had a second goal of burying the memory of the 90s bank failures. Big banks, the thinking went, were safe banks.

By the December 2005 deadline, only 25 banks were left standing. Getting there required the biggest fundraising Nigeria’s capital market had ever seen.

Euromoney reported ₦406 billion raised domestically in 2005, with more than $650 million from international investors. The Nigerian Stock Exchange was busy with new listings, rights issues, and follow-on offerings through 2005 and 2006, and the brokers underwriting it all got rich.

Many of these capital raises were exactly what they said they were, with real money from institutional and retail investors who wanted to own a piece of bigger, safer banks. Others were something stranger.

Afribank had used depositors’ money to buy 80% of its own public offer, paying ₦25 per share for stock that was trading at ₦11 on the Exchange. The shares later fell below ₦3.

Intercontinental Bank had raised 30% of its share capital with depositor funds. Oceanic Bank’s CEO ended up controlling more than 35% of the bank through Special Purpose Vehicles financed the same way. A significant part of the consolidation had been a sham.

Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, who became Central Bank Governor in 2009, shared the findings in a 2010 convocation lecture at Bayero University in Kano after CBN auditors examined the wreckage.

The verification process Soludo publicly committed to in 2004 had, in Sanusi’s words, been stopped “for some unexplained reason.” Central Bank officials had raised concerns with their own senior management at the time, and the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) had documented its worries and pressed for action. Both were ignored.

By the end of 2007, the market capitalisation of the 25 surviving banks had grown ninefold, and they accounted for 60% of the entire Nigerian Stock Exchange. Banks took almost all the money raised from the market that year, as new issues soared from ₦552.78 billion in 2005 to ₦2.4 trillion in 2007.

It was a rising tide that lifted all boats. Banks and brokers booked interest income, the issuing houses collected their fees, and Soludo could point to all the activity as proof the reforms had worked. By April 2007, Nigeria had 246 registered brokerage firms, up from the small club that existed before consolidation.

The success then traveled overseas when Soludo was named African central banker of the year and the Nigerian Stock Exchange was called the world’s best-performing bourse.

Every time he opened a newspaper, Adewole saw good news. At that point, there was nothing else to see.

Then came the loans

By 2007, people like Adewole who had bought bank shares could take loans to buy even more shares. So you would put up your ₦2 million in shares as collateral, and the bank would lend you another ₦2 million to buy more. When share prices rose, you could sell some of the shares, repay the loan, and keep the difference.

It was hinged on the presumption that prices would keep rising, and for a while they did. Every price increase made the collateral worth more, which justified more lending, which put more money into the same shares, which pushed the price up again. It was roundtripping of epic proportions.

By the end of 2008, the banks were carrying ₦1.2 trillion in share-backed loans, of which roughly ₦400 billion were direct margin loans to individuals and stockbrokers.

The exposures ran through the biggest names in the industry: Intercontinental, GTBank, Ecobank, First Bank, UBA, Diamond, Union, Stanbic IBTC. Some of it was margin lending to retail customers, while the rest was to corporate clients. The banks and their customers would be fine as long as the share prices stayed up.

Olutola Mobolurin of Capital Bancorp described the mechanism perfectly. Stocks were sold to people who were made to believe that prices would never come down. Margin loans were given to buyers who did not know that a falling price would wipe them out.

Adewole was one of them. He held shares he had bought from a bank alongside a margin loan the bank had given him to buy more of those shares. Because the shares themselves were the collateral for the loan, when the price fell, the value of the collateral fell with it, and the bank could call the loan, which would force him to sell the shares to repay it, pushing the price further, and causing the bank to call in even more of the loan.

He could never have seen this coming from just reading the newspapers.

The people behind the scenes

Peter Ukuoritsemofe Ololo was a chartered accountant and licensed stockbroker who studied accounting at Ahmadu Bello University and spent more than a decade at Union Bank and ICON Limited before starting Falcon Securities in 1993. The Wall Street Journal described him as a once high-flying stockbroker for Nigeria’s biggest banks and wealthy individuals, a man who drove himself in a Peugeot 307 while, on some days, his firm accounted for 40% of trading volume on the Nigerian Stock Exchange.

By the boom years, Falcon was the brokerage, and Ololo was the market maker, and being the biggest buyer and borrower gave him leverage nobody else had.

Companies in which Ololo was a director or major shareholder borrowed more than $700 million from five banks, an incredibly large exposure in a fragile system. Separately, the CBN’s debtor list put the exposure incurred through Falcon Securities at ₦88.3 billion, making Ololo the largest individual debtor to three failed banks.

According to EFCC testimony at a Lagos High Court in 2014, a Falcon Securities account was opened with a zero balance to receive a ₦15 billion credit line; another ₦15 billion went to Falcon for the purchase of blue-chip stocks on the floor of the Exchange. The case was still being tried in 2015, and no final public judgment is available.

In a separate matter, Ololo, Adigwe and six others pleaded not guilty to a 36-count charge of conspiracy, stealing and receiving stolen property; that case, too, had reached no verdict by 2015.

According to the Wall Street Journal, when a bank wanted its share price moved, an executive would call Ololo and tell him to buy or sell, and other traders would follow his lead. The EFCC named Ololo in two cases, alleging he had conspired with Sebastian Adigwe of Afribank and Bartholomew Ebong of Union Bank, “by fraudulent means to manipulate the market price” of both banks’ shares.

If Ololo was the broker the banks used, Erastus Akingbola was the bank. He had founded Intercontinental, built it into one of Nigeria’s five biggest, and given it the face of a modern institution with hundreds of thousands of shareholders.

In one EFCC account, Intercontinental issued three cheques totalling ₦10 billion in May 2009 to Tropics Securities and related entities, for shares said to have been bought on the bank’s behalf. Investigators said Akingbola held substantial interests in those same firms. The EFCC alleged he had used ₦179 billion to buy Intercontinental’s shares and prop up its price.

This was a world of dealings Adewole knew nothing about.

In yet another world, there were private placements that allowed you to buy company shares before they listed on the Exchange. The belief was that once the shares were listed, the public would chase them, the prices would rise, and people who got in early would get rich.

Make your first trade

Between 2004 and 2008, roughly ₦650 billion was raised across some 300 private placements, and many of the companies involved never publicly listed.

More than a decade later, Mary Uduk, then the SEC’s acting director-general, told a conference at the University of Lagos that many private companies had exploited gaps in the law during the boom, promising investors public listings they never intended to pursue. She singled out BGL Plc, formerly Banc Garanti, a capital market operator that raised money and never brought its shares to the Exchange.

Other companies gave reasons for not listing.

ARM Properties raised ₦5.675 billion in August 2008, with a listing planned for the fourth quarter. By 2009, its board had postponed the listing, saying the market could not give investors fair value, and the company eventually surfaced on the NASD over-the-counter market as Mixta Real Estate.

Geo-Fluids opened a ₦12 billion placement in May 2008, with shareholders approving a listing the following year, but management found the market too tepid, and the shares did not trade until 2013. Aquitane Oil & Gas sought another ₦15 billion in June 2008, and there’s no account of what became of the offer.

Whether a company never meant to list or didn’t manage to, investors were stuck with shares that could not be sold.

Starcomms’ private placement opened on June 3, 2008, and closed the same day, offering 4.95 billion shares at ₦13 each, with Stanbic IBTC and Chapel Hill Denham as joint issuing houses.

It listed on the stock exchange in July at ₦13.56, fell to ₦7.46 within two months, and ended the year at ₦3.86. Chapel Hill later said that several investors never even read the private placement memorandum. Many bought through brokers and friends who were among the invited investors, without seeing the documents or understanding that Starcomms had been sold as a growth stock expected to lose money in 2008, turn profitable in 2009, and pay dividends in 2010.

The crash

In April 2008, Meristem Securities published a report in BusinessDay: The Nigerian Stock Market Crash: Coming Soon?

That same month, stockbrokers started calling the clients who had borrowed against their shares to let them know the banks wanted their money back. If share prices were still this high, the customers asked, why couldn’t the banks wait? No one had a clear answer. The brokers’ instruction was to repay or sell, usually within days.

Most people had no cash because everything was in the shares, so they were forced to sell. Those sales caused prices to fall, and by the end of April the All-Share Index had declined from 66,121 to 60,339, nine percent in four weeks. Many interpreted this as a market correction.

So when the index edged back to 60,570 in May, it seemed like the worst had passed, so some clients bought more. The bounce lasted three weeks.

June closed at 54,905, and July slid further to 50,422 even as CBN governor Soludo assured the public that with crude at $147 a barrel and reserves at $64 billion, there was nothing to worry about.

Throughout public addresses in July and early August, Soludo claimed Nigerian banks were insulated from the global financial crisis because their fundamentals were great. The market wasn’t buying it, and prices continued to slide.

On August 28, the Federal Government called a meeting in Abuja and invited the Central Bank, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Nigerian Stock Exchange, and the major brokerages.

The meeting resolved on a range of measures to arrest the stock market slide. The SEC would halve its fees, and the CBN would lower its monetary policy rate, its cash reserve requirement, and its liquidity ratio. Banks would restructure margin loans through 2009, giving them time before recognising bad loans.

Crucially, the Nigerian Stock Exchange changed how much a stock could move in a day. Up, five percent. Down, one percent.

It would take months for a stock price to halve given the one percent rule, and until it did, buyers weren’t interested in paying these artificial prices.

Through September and October 2008, investors who tried to sell shares could not because there were no bids.

In October, the Exchange bowed to common sense and removed the one percent rule. The official explanation was that it didn’t align with international practice, but the backlog of unfilled sell orders had become unmanageable.

With the rule gone, the air went out of the balloon at once. The All-Share Index opened in October near 46,000 and closed at 36,325, a decline of more than twenty percent. By November 28th, the index was at 33,025. By December 16th, 28,085.

Over sixty per cent of the three hundred-odd securities listed on the Exchange were on constant offer. At every price, sellers outnumbered buyers. No matter the price they were looking to exit at, shareholders could not get out.

Adewole was one of them. By the end of 2008, he had stopped opening the newspaper. His shares were worth a fraction of the loan they secured; the bank wanted its money, and there was no cash and no buyer. So the bank took the shares, millions of them, as unsellable in their hands as they had been in his.

In June 2009, President Yar’Adua replaced Soludo with a new central bank governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, who ordered the Central Bank and the Deposit Insurance Corporation to open the banks’ books together.

On August 14 2009, Sanusi announced that five banks: Afribank, Intercontinental, Oceanic, Union Bank, and Finbank, were insolvent. The five banks had ₦2.8 trillion in loans. Almost half of the loans (₦1.14 trillion) were non-performing, with another ₦456 billion in margin loans.

Sanusi sacked all five chief executives. Erastus Akingbola of Intercontinental, Cecilia Ibru of Oceanic, Bartholomew Ebong of Union, Okey Nwosu of Finbank, and Sebastian Adigwe of Afribank.

In October, three more chief executives at Bank PHB, Spring Bank, and Equatorial Trust Bank were sacked. The CBN then injected ₦620 billion into the rescued banks, some two and a half percent of Nigeria’s 2010 GDP.

Eight days before Akingbola was sacked, Aliko Dangote had been elected the seventeenth president of the Council of the Nigerian Stock Exchange.

At the time of his election, Intercontinental Bank alleged in a petition that Dangote’s companies owed it ₦35.8 billion—Dangote denied owing the bank. Either way, a bank listed on the stock exchange was publicly calling the Exchange’s President a debtor. In August 2010, the SEC removed him, along with the Exchange’s director-general.

Of the eight sacked bank chiefs, only Cecilia Ibru was initially convicted in 2010 after she was charged with twenty-five counts of bank and securities fraud. She entered a plea bargain, and the charges were reduced to three. Francis Atuche of Bank PHB was later convicted in 2021, with the conviction upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2022.

On October 8, 2010, Justice Dan Abutu of the Federal High Court in Lagos sentenced her to six months on each count, running concurrently. She served a prison term of six months and forfeited 199 assets, including properties in Maryland (USA), Lagos, and Dubai, shares, and over ₦190 billion in cash. About $7 million was realised from the sale of sixty-one of those properties, and $3.27 million was transferred to the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria.

Erastus Akingbola fled to London on the day Sanusi sacked him and stayed there for about a year. In 2010, under threat of extradition, he returned to Nigeria and pleaded not guilty. The case was reassigned to a judge named Charles Archibong, who dismissed the charges and barred prosecutors from trying Akingbola again.

The National Judicial Council later compulsorily retired Archibong, primarily for what they termed his mishandling of the case. The Supreme Court would overturn Archibong’s judgment six years later.

Sixteen years after Akingbola was first charged, his case has yet to produce a verdict. At least fifteen judges have handled it, and one of his lawyers has died of old age.

Peter Ololo, the broker whom other brokers called “Market,” was arrested twice in 2009 and released on bail. His lawyer, Femi Falana, told the Wall Street Journal in December that year: “He was simply managing the stocks. When the shares were going up, everyone was happy. Now that the shares are falling, he can’t be blamed for that.” As of 2014, the trial was still being adjourned, and there’s no public record of the courts reaching a verdict.

In May 2019, a reporter from the Punch found a 69-year-old man named Abraham Owoeye selling plumbing materials, roofing sheets, and cement out of a small shop in Lagos. In 2004, he had been talked into buying ₦3 million in shares. By 2009, the shares were worth a fraction of that. Eleven years later, his dividends still sat unclaimed at the registrar.

By December 2018, unclaimed dividends in the Nigerian capital market had soared to ₦129.62 billion.

Some shareholders had died, others had bought shares in different names. Some could not be bothered to fight through registrars, indemnities and paperwork for dividends that now felt too small to justify the trouble.

Many, like Owoeye, had simply moved on from the market.

“I just decided not to think about it because at 69, I have realised that there is more to this life,” Owoeye said.

In March 2026, the All-Share Index of the Nigerian Stock Exchange crossed 200,000 points for the first time in its history. For anyone who had stopped checking in 2008, it was just another number.

Adewole Peter wouldn’t have opened the paper for it. Abraham Owoeye, who was selling plumbing materials in Lagos eleven years after the crash and refusing to read anything with numbers in it, wouldn’t have cared. A chart can go back up, but a person may not.

The market has had two strong years, with pension funds looking at equities again and foreign investors buying Nigerian assets. A new generation of retail investors is investing in a market that is no longer as mysterious as it used to be.

It is a better market than the one that found Adewole at his bank branch and sold him shares he didn’t fully understand.

The Central Bank of Nigeria is not where it was in 2008. In the last year, it has pushed banks to recognise the cost of old regulatory forbearance, restricted dividends for affected banks, and asked lenders to stress-test their books.

It’s not that the CBN has become incapable of failure; after all, regulators always look strongest between crises. Rather, it is more that some of the things that were hidden in 2008 are harder to hide now.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is also less sleepy. In 2026, a handful of stockbrokers were penalised for infractions that included false trading and trades capable of creating artificial prices.

When UBA and Access did not pay final dividends for 2025, investors sold. The share prices moved the way share prices should move when shareholders realise that reported profit and cash in their accounts are not the same thing. This is the healthier version of a market that punishes disappointment and reads regulatory circulars. It asks whether profit can survive provisioning, and notices when a bank cannot turn earnings into dividends.

But memory does not move with the index. The people who were burnt in 2008 weren’t sitting at home waiting for better disclosure standards. They still aren’t.

Their market thesis is simply “never again.” They lost the belief that the market was a fair place to take risks as they watched banks sell shares, lend against those shares, use those shares as collateral, then seize the shares when the prices fell. They watched brokers talk confidently until the phones stopped ringing. They watched private placements promise future listings that never came.

And they watched bank chiefs walk in and out of court years later, while ordinary investors adjusted their lives around the hole left in their savings.

So today, the question is not whether the stock market can create wealth or not. It can. The question is whether the next Adewole enters it differently and with more information.

About Sponsored Notadeepdive editions

Sponsored Notadeepdive essays are commissioned by ambitious companies we carefully choose to work with. They support the kind of long-form business stories that are researched, thoughtful and useful to readers.

The essay is held to the same standard as every other Notadeepdive edition.

For questions or feedback about sponsored editions, email me at olumuyiwa@notadeepdive.com.

Today’s Notadeepdive was brought to you by Zedcrest Wealth.

Alongside access to the market, Zedcrest Wealth invests in investor education through the Zedcrest Wealth Academy, expert market insights, and stock recommendations that help people make decisions based on understanding rather than excitement or FOMO.

Take Your Position is our invitation to actively participate in the market with clarity, confidence, and conviction.

Edited by: Yahaya Hassan, Ikenna ‘BFG’ Sam-Ejehu

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Jumia (Don’t groan!)

If you’ve read this newsletter for any length of time, you’ve watched me obsess over Jumia for years. I’ve talked about their dark stores, their cloud bill, how they’re no longer a doorstep delivery company, nd the magic they'll need to pull off to be profitable by 2028.

What I've never done is tell the Jumia story from the beginning. Like how Jumia started life in 2012 as two separate companies called Kasuwa and Sabunta, or how the company you know as Jumia was legally Africa Internet Group until 2016.

I realised quickly that a story like this doesn't fit in a newsletter. Fourteen years of filings, court documents, and investor presentations, and the world Jumia was formed in, needed audio, not another 3,000 words.

So Nnanna (of Fintech is Easy, and comfortably this newsletter's favourite guest writer) and I made Africa Built, a podcast that reconstructs how Africa's biggest companies were actually built.

Episode 1 is Jumia: The Amazon of Africa, and it's full of details I didn't know until I started digging. Konga's eventual buyer, Leo Stan Ekeh, insists he was building e-commerce in Nigeria before Jumia or Konga existed.

The Jumia–Konga war that invented Nigerian Black Friday was funded on both sides, in part, by the same Swedish money.

▶ [Listen to Episode 1: The Amazon of Africa] on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple.

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Kitchen in search of work

Your favourite restaurant might be two hours away. That is nice to know on an ordinary day and no help at all when you want a hot meal now. So you cook, walk to the buka five minutes from the house, stop at Chicken Republic on the way home, or you open an app and let it bring you the best thing nearby.

Restaurants, delivery apps and cloud kitchens are three answers to the problem of needing good food right away.

A Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) pays for nearness in advance. It takes a site on a busy road, pays rent, puts cooks, freezers, tables and waits for people to walk in and buy good. The rent pays for a kitchen, but it also pays for a place in front of customers. The people walking into the restaurant help cover the staff and equipment before anyone a delivery app brings more customers.

That is the cheapest version of nearness but is still not an easy business. Food Concepts reported revenue of ₦107.5 billion in 2025 and kept about ₦7.2 billion after tax which is 6.6 kobo for every naira of revenue. And that’s with almost 300 outlets, a large procurement operation, and all the walk-in demand its locations can generate.

The delivery app does not need to rent a kitchen or buy ingredients. It aggregates restaurants near you, displays them on one screen, and delivers. The restaurant keeps the food margin, the rider gets paid for the trip, and the app takes a commission and service fee. From its share of the transaction, it pays for refunds, support, and technology. DoorDash completed 903 million orders worth $29.7 billion in the last quarter of 2025 and reported $213 million in profit.

A cloud kitchen’s goal is to escape the constraints of the first two models. It takes the expensive outlet on a busy road out of the equation, along with the dining room and front-of-house staff.

Instead, it rents one central kitchen from which it sells a bevy of food brands. Asian food, Nigerian breakfast options, spicy lunch…you get the picture. It uses the same rent, cold room, prep team, and equipment to serve customers these options.

That is FoodCourt’s model. In 2024, it had about 15 brands in two Lagos kitchens. It said it handled 30,000 orders a month, at an average order value of ₦15,000.

A family could order Chinese food, native dishes and burgers in one basket. A customer who did not want noodles could order jollof. Someone who did not want either could order shawarma. Diverse brands gave FoodCourt more chances to turn roughly the same inputs into more orders.

That model works when there are enough orders to begin with. A kitchen’s costs are roughly the same whether it makes 500 meals a day or 50. An army of brands does not automatically make a kitchen busy.

FoodCourt never published how its 30,000 monthly orders were split between its two locations. If we assume an equal spread, the kitchens were doing about 15,000 orders each month, or roughly 500 a day.

Then it set out to grow with by expanding to Abuja, and a plan for smaller locations reaching deeper Lagos neighbourhoods, with the central kitchens as hubs. Each new kitchen is its own bet on the demand around it.

An Abuja kitchen cannot use a busy evening in Lekki to pay its cooks. A third Lagos kitchen cannot use an order from Gbagada to keep its lights on. Each kitchen needs enough people inside a workable delivery radius, ordering often enough to costs.

FoodCourt would have needed another 15,000 monthly orders just to keep three kitchens working at the same average level as two. It’s unclear whether it found those orders.

The cloud model saves money by concentrating production but a growth plan requires spreading production out.

What we know is that two former employees told TechCabal that growth did not keep pace with the cost of the second Lagos site and Abuja. FoodCourt’s chief executive, Henry Nneji, said the company had believed the Abuja launch would strengthen its long-term position, but that circumstances evolved differently than expected.

The startup couldn’t wait around for diners to walk in so it would have relied on its app. It also listed some brands on Chowdeck for visibility and ran corporate meal services. It made bread, juices and sauces for retailers. It made food for other businesses and even experimented with grocery delivery.

A kitchen that has rent, ovens, cold storage, prep staff and inventory cannot sit idle between lunch and dinner. Corporate meals can fill lunch. Chowdeck can bring customers FoodCourt’s app does not reach. Retail can keep a bakery working. Contract manufacturing can turn spare capacity into someone else’s product.

At a certain point, FoodCourt was a kitchen looking for work.

The cloud kitchen removes the dining room, but it also removes the walk-in customer who helps pay for the kitchen while delivery demand is still growing. FoodCourt had to create that demand itself, then keep finding more of it each time it added another site.

The app gives FoodCourt the full food margin, but it has to acquire the customer. Chowdeck brings visibility, but takes a commission from the business FoodCourt was built to keep. Corporate meals, retail and contract manufacturing can make a kitchen work harder, but they also turn the company into a caterer, retailer and manufacturer alongside its original job as a restaurant and delivery business.

FoodCourt had said it was profitable in 2024 just after it rebuilt parts of its operation. It got larger equipment, pre-prepped ingredients, a push to get meal preparation down to 20 minutes, and made nearly 100 people redundant after it said it had identified theft, wastage and underpricing.

A company can be profitable while raising money to expand so no questions there. A company can also be profitable at one kitchen location and still be unable to finance the next one from its cash pile.

Food Concepts has the scale FoodCourt hoped to achieve with a dense store network, big procurement volumes and customers already walking through the door. Even then, there is not much room in the business for a new location to open badly, for a kitchen to sit underused, or for costs to rise faster than orders.

TechCabal reports that salaries were delayed across FoodCourt’s three branches and Nneji told staff that a funding facility in its final stages had taken longer than expected.

We do not know the size of the facility, who was providing it or whether it was meant to fund expansion, unpaid operating bills or both. FoodCourt is a private company so we may never get answers to those questions.

But taken together, we can piece together from public record a coherent theory for what happened here.

FoodCourt had built more kitchen capacity which it then tried to fill that capacity through direct delivery, aggregators, corporate meals, retail and contract manufacturing. The new locations did not grow quickly enough to cover their added costs, putting a business with thin enough margins on skates.

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A supply-side problem

In America, roughly 400,000 independent restaurants compete for visibility, which makes an aggregator useful. The same oversupply is why the platforms can charge high commissions; with no single restaurant being indispensable, food delivery platforms take 15 to 30% on each order, on restaurant margins of 3 to 5%.

In Nigeria, bukkas and independent kitchens feed most of the country. Only four Quick Service Restaurant franchises have more than thirty outlets each, and below them, a few large single-brand chains.

The restaurants that can supply delivery platforms at scale have the kitchens, footprint, and discipline to produce at volume. What they lack—software, last-mile logistics—they can buy. Yet, for now, the specialisation of restaurants and delivery platforms suits everyone. The restaurants get demand they didn’t generate, and the platforms get users and retention. If the dynamics broke tomorrow, major restaurant chains would lose a sales channel, and the platform may lose its reason to exist.

In changing the balance, a restaurant may decide to go directly to the customer; after all, software has never been cheaper. The hard (and valuable) half is the messy business of logistics. All that to say: Chicken Republic is pushing its own delivery app (again!) while continuing a partnership with Glovo and Chowdeck.

Chicken Republic

Chicken Republic has been one of the food delivery apps’ biggest suppliers for years, Chowdeck named it one of its fastest-growing partners in 2025. For most of that stretch, the channel was close to being invisible on Food Concepts (Chicken Republic’s parent company)books until 2025. The trade receivables the company booked from its online partners over the year, i.e, Glovo and Chowdeck, grew from under ₦800 million to ₦12.6 billion.

In August 2024, Food Concepts signed an exclusive delivery deal with Chowdeck in Lagos and Ibadan, pulling the chain off rivals like Glovo and HeyFood in those cities. This came a year after Chowdeck onboarded the chain and saw a surge in its order volume. By one analyst’s estimate, Chicken Republic may account for thirty percent of Nigeria’s food-delivery order volume, with multi-brand restaurant chains completing the pie.

It may be one reason Food Concepts launched Republic Dash, a first-party ordering app carrying Chicken Republic, PieXpress, and Chopbox, the three brands under its roof in 2025. (Was the name inspired by DoorDash?)

Republic Dash is in select cities across Nigeria and Ghana, and it has crossed ten thousand installs on the Play Store. It has a companion driver app, though it is still unclear if Chicken Republic hires riders or uses another company’s fleet.

In its 2025 report, Food Concepts describes Republic Dash as a way of “building direct relationships with our most valuable customers.” It filed the app under omnichannel alongside its current delivery partners.

Chicken Republic began taking website orders as early as 2015 and ran phone-and-web experiments through the pandemic. All of it amounted to nothing, so it is easy to file Republic Dash alongside those forgotten experiments.

But the earlier attempts failed due to timing. The market education that makes a direct channel viable and the slow work of educating customers did not exist until recently. The platforms that invested in customer education are now gone: OFood, Jumia Food, Bolt Food.

Also, building a proprietary stack historically meant expensive custom software and idle courier fleets. But cheap engineering is now abundant, last-mile logistics has become something an asset-heavy chain can buy, and the sales numbers suggest there’s something to fight for.

And Food Concepts is not the company it was years ago, and neither is the food delivery market it operates in a semblance of its former self. The restaurant chains have taken a long, unpaid education in the economics of selling food online, courtesy of the very apps it fed. What it brings now is a central kitchen, distribution fleet, centralised procurement, warehousing and dedicated production units. It is the infrastructure that makes the chain indispensable to the aggregators, and the same infrastructure that app-native food delivery apps with their in-house kitchens, like FoodCourt, have been trying to assemble.

The Illusion of Dominance?

The truly scarce input in Nigerian food delivery is standardized, branded, delivery-ready food. Very few kitchens can produce a consistent product at scale under a trusted brand name.

When supply is this thin, durable value accrues to the producer, not the courier. Aggregators look dominant because they currently control demand generation and last-mile fulfilment. To fill out their catalogues, they have onboarded informal vendors diligently. But the chains drive the volume. When Jumia Food launched as HelloFood in 2012, and when later aggregators entered, their growth engines were the same institutional names. Those brands were part of why users downloaded the apps in the first place.

The platforms have rarely turned that volume into success. Jumia Food lost money for a decade before shutting down its continental footprint in late 2023. Bolt Food had exited Nigeria weeks earlier, reportedly having lost primary quick-service franchises to competitors. The platforms absorb the heavy capital losses of the logistics layer, while the franchises keep the customer and outlive the tech companies built to serve them.

Part of what makes the chains defensible is economies of scale. Buying ingredients by the metric ton lets the chains absorb currency shocks and pass some of the savings to the consumer. A nascent food delivery operator juggling delivery and its own kitchen operations buys raw inputs closer to retail prices.

The squeeze runs down into the courier network. Aggregators are caught in a multi-sided bind: they cannot raise delivery fees on a price-sensitive consumer, and they cannot cut rider payouts without losing riders to competitors.

Can the Chicken go the last mile?

Yet the fast-food business is also a struggle. Even Nigeria’s best-run QSR groups keep less than seven naira of every hundred they generate. Food Concepts recorded a net profit margin of 6.7% in 2025, up from 3.5% the previous year. This thinness leaves little to fund an expensive tech operation.

Cloud kitchens, food delivery apps that produce their own food, across the world have demonstrated that cooking and packing food, maintaining logistics operations, generating demand and managing customer-relationship software are distinct and capital-intensive businesses.

Being cost-efficient and successful at one says nothing about the other three.

Chicken Republic’s decade of failed logistics experiments may also suggest a structural inability to manage delivery. Republic Dash has 10,000 downloads; Chowdeck claims over 1.5 million users and says it is profitable.

There is little evidence that a legacy fast-food operator has the institutional muscle to pull off this adventure. If Republic Dash tries to compete as a discovery engine for its own brands, it may struggle to outspend platforms for the digital attention it used to receive for a small commission.

But there is a narrower, more plausible version of the bet. City-wide rider availability is essential for a marketplace connecting thousands of restaurants to millions of homes. But a single chain delivering its own food from local outlets to repeat customers within a fixed radius faces a simpler operational problem.

Aggregator Defenses

The platforms are not waiting to see how this plays out. In the past two years, they have been spending to get ahead of suppliers who may route around their marketplaces.

Much of the investment is going into groceries, where supply is abundant and substitutable. Grocery delivery is a category nobody loves on margin, about 1-3%, and everybody wants on frequency. Glovo is running micro-fulfilment dark stores in select locations. Delivery Hero, its parent company, has found that customers who order food and groceries spend more than five times what food-only customers do. Chowdeck is reportedly opening two dark stores weekly, aiming for five hundred by the end of 2026, stocked through an exclusive partnership with the bulk e-commerce platform GoLemon, which handles sourcing and quality control while Chowdeck runs fulfillment.

Another sharp move is to get inside the merchant so that leaving the platform costs something. Last June, Chowdeck bought Mira, a point-of-sale system for restaurants. This backend integration has the potential to create an operational dependency that discourages vendors from switching from the platform, and even if they do, convert them to customers of a different product within its ecosystem.

Glovo is chasing the same supplier lock-in with loans. Through a 2025 partnership with the fintech Salad Africa, Glovo extends working-capital loans to its restaurants, underwritten by their real-time sales on the app and repaid as a slice of future orders processed through Glovo. A restaurant carrying the platform’s working capital may find leaving complicated.

Chowdeck built Relay, an on-demand, white-label logistics utility, reachable by API or dashboard and paid strictly per drop. If a chain like Chicken Republic migrates customers to a first-party app to escape marketplace commissions, Food delivery apps can still earn on the volume by serving as the underlying courier, without carrying the cost of acquiring those customers. By selling last-mile to the vendors expanding beyond its app, the biggest supplier can become a customer of a different product.

Both major platforms are building defenses around the concentration risk of depending on a few corporate kitchens. Read together, Chicken Republic’s app and the aggregators’ countermoves are the same strategy executed from opposite ends of the value chain. The supplier is integrating forward into delivery; the aggregator is integrating backward into supply.

If platforms keep their margins by owning discovery and the grocery run, while the chains find that going direct costs more per order than the commission they already pay, concentration is a feature the market can live with, and Republic Dash will remain a marketing curiosity.

See you on Sunday!