Blog

There is a recurring question that always surfaces when global investors look at emerging market fintech: How do you balance the promise of impact with the pressure of delivering institutional-grade returns and what is fintech impact investing? The question itself carries an assumption—that impact and IRR sit on opposite sides of a scale, and that […]

Every so often, a continent reaches a moment where its economic architecture has to decide what it wants to become. Africa has been inching toward such a moment for two decades, pulled forward by technology faster than its regulatory systems could adapt, and restrained by borders that were designed long before the digital economy existed.

The future of fintech will be decided not by who innovates fastest, but by who can innovate cleanly. In emerging markets, where informal economies still dominate and banking systems are often fragmented, Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) regulation define the boundaries of credibility. These aren’t bureaucratic obstacles; they’re the scaffolding on which

The phrase open banking in Africa used to sound like a distant aspiration — a policy import waiting to mature. Yet, over the past few years, it has become the most transformative regulatory shift in the continent’s fintech ecosystem. For the first time, the conversation has moved beyond mobile money and payments into something deeper:

In the end, every investor faces the same paradox: the pursuit of growth without the erosion of purpose. How fintech funds evaluate impact has been framed for years as a zero-sum question: measure what matters and you’ll miss your numbers; chase your numbers and impact becomes a brochure. The problem is not the ambition but

Cross-border payments regulation in Africa is quietly reshaping how money moves across the continent. For founders, it’s no longer a back-office compliance issue — it’s the defining infrastructure of scale. At Caban Global Reach Private Equity — a fintech investment fund investing across Africa’s frontier markets — we see this every day. When a fintech

Governance in African fintech has become the quiet test of endurance — the measure of who scales sustainably and who burns out under the weight of their own momentum. The strongest founders no longer see governance as a bureaucratic constraint but as the operating system of trust. At Caban Global Reach Private Equity — a

A fintech investment fund doesn’t have the luxury of pretending. Capital either compounds or it leaks. Over the years We’ve learned to focus on a handful of signals that cut through noise and make decisions simpler, faster, and—most importantly—more right than wrong. None of this is mysterious. It’s practical, sometimes unglamorous, and it tends to

Fintech licensing in Africa is rarely the first thing founders dream about, yet it quickly becomes the test that separates momentum from maturity. It usually begins with a quiet victory — a fintech founder landing traction in one market, perhaps Kenya or Nigeria, and feeling the pull to expand. The model works. The metrics look

An emerging market fintech fund lives at the intersection of necessity and invention. You see it every time a local currency crisis turns engineers into infrastructure builders or when regulators leapfrog legacy systems because they never had the luxury of bloat. The coming three years will be less about hype and more about resolution—markets that