Layoffs at Branch

Happy salary day. 💸

Dear tech worker, you have approximately 24 hours before your bank balance starts lying to you again. While you enjoy the brief illusion of wealth, here is your African tech briefing. 

For a month or two, we momentarily forgot that African tech companies went on a layoff drive. Branch, the Visa-backed digital lending company operating in Kenya and Nigeria, just resurfaced those memories.

Here's what happened: In April, the fintech laid off an undisclosed number of employees in Kenya and Nigeria. The affected employees were informed during a global all-hands meeting, before receiving termination notices that took effect immediately. Some affected staff told TechCabal that they lost access to internal systems shortly after the meeting ended.

Another fintech layoff enters the group chat: Globally, layoffs are becoming a dime a dozen; companies like Meta, Coinbase, Cisco, and Clickup have cut staff in 2026. In Africa, a similar pattern holds. Zap Africa, a startup that offers crypto trading services, laid off eight employees, keeping ten. In March, Kuda, a Nigerian digital bank, laid off hundreds of employees in a restructuring move. In the same month, Quidax, another crypto startup, also reduced headcount.

This is the part doing everybody’s head in: Branch said it is not struggling financially. The startup noted that both its Nigerian and Kenyan businesses remained profitable in 2025, and the broader group reportedly generated around $30 million in global profit that year. This suggests the decision to reduce headcount was likely operational rather than financial.

So… why cut jobs if business is good? Branch did not disclose the number of affected employees beyond saying it is reducing headcount across some markets. Across Africa’s tech ecosystem, leaner operations are becoming the default. Profitability is no longer enough; investors now want to see efficient growth without heavy cash burn.

Branch offered affected employees severance packages covering several months of compensation and extended healthcare. The cuts are a reminder that in today's market, jobs can disappear even at companies that are doing well financially.

Investec, South Africa's fifth-largest commercial bank by assets, wants to go to Europe, and Ireland is its entry point.

According to local publication Business Tech, the bank has applied for an Irish banking licence, a move that would unlock full banking activities across a bloc sitting on roughly $45 trillion in assets. Investec already operates in Dublin through its European unit, having maintained a presence there since acquiring NCB Stockbrokers, a wealth management firm, in 2012. But the existing setup limits what it can do. An Irish licence changes that.

State of play: The timing makes sense in context. Brexit, short for “British exit,” was the United Kingdom's departure from the European Union (EU) in 2020, following a 2016 referendum. It severed the relatively free access UK-based financial firms once had to European clients and markets, forcing many to rethink where they planted their flags inside the bloc.

Between the lines: Ireland, with its English-speaking workforce and established regulatory framework, has since become the favoured landing spot for banks repositioning inside the EU. Investec is essentially playing catch-up with a trend that has been building for years.

On Friday, Fani Titi, the bank’s chief executive officer, told Bloomberg that the company has been in discussions with regulators for some time and expects the licence to come through before the end of the year. Once it does, the ambition is clear: serve corporate and wealthy clients more aggressively across the continent.

This is not a standalone move. Investec is in the middle of a broader expansion push. It recently announced plans to transition from a specialist lender to a full-service primary bank in the UK, is hiring relationship managers and credit officers, and wants to nearly double its private-client base to around 250,000 by 2030.

This one’s quite new: a major national train agency wants to launch its own ride-hailing service and compete with Bolt, Uber, and Wanatu. What are the odds?

Last Friday, the Gautrain Management Agency (GMA), a South African state-owned company that oversees the Gautrain rapid rail network, announced plans to launch Gau Express, an e-hailing service set to go live in October. The service will be built into the existing Gautrain app and offer discounted fares to commuters who connect via rail. 

Think of it as a last-mile fix: For passengers who step off the train and cannot wait for a scheduled feeder bus, Gau Express would theoretically get them the rest of the way home.

Vehicles will be branded in Gautrain's gold-and-blue colours for easy identification, and payment will work through conventional methods or a Gautrain card balance. GMA chief executive officer Tshepo Kgobe has also hinted at adding e-bikes and scooters down the line, though the immediate focus is getting the core service off the ground. 

The timing is interesting. South Africa's ride-hailing market is still finding its footing under the National Land Transport Amendment Act, gazetted in September 2025, which brought e-hailing operators under a formal licencing regime for the first time. By the March 2026 deadline, only a handful of operators, including Bolt and local competitor Wanatu, had registered. Uber, the market leader, failed to secure an e-hailing operator certificate after the March deadline passed.

Zoom out: Whether Gau Express can carve out real market share against established players is an open question. But a state-owned rail agency entering the ride-hailing wars? Nobody had that on their bingo card.

Much of Africa's Internet runs on subsea cables. Every time your Internet starts buffering, there's a chance that some underwater cable somewhere is fighting for its life.

Enter Orange. The telecoms operator is backing a new 20,000-kilometre subsea cable project, named Via Africa, that will connect Nigeria and nearly 20 countries across Africa and Europe. 

A new Internet highway is loading: The project is being developed by an Orange-led consortium and is expected to run through the Atlantic corridor linking West Africa directly to Europe instead of relying heavily on existing Mediterranean routes. The cable is expected to land in countries including Nigeria, Senegal, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mauritania, with more landing points likely to be added later.

Why this cable matters: According to TeleGeography data, Africa currently has 77 active or planned subsea cable systems, but more than half of the continent’s international bandwidth still flows through the Big Four (Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Kenya) and Algeria. Orange says cable cuts occur globally, on average, every two days. When one cable gets damaged, entire countries can suddenly experience slower Internet, banking disruptions, or poor video streaming.

What does the average Internet user get from this? If the project works as planned, it could mean faster Internet speeds, more stable connectivity, lower latency, and stronger support for cloud services, fintech, and streaming across West Africa. It could also attract more hyperscale data centres and cloud providers into the region.

Though Orange has not publicly disclosed the cable's final capacity, it noted that the infrastructure is being designed to accommodate long-term growth in Internet demand across Africa.