MTN’s AI cables

Good morning ☀️

Happy Monday. A moment of silence for the dearly departed weekend. It’s a new week to lock in and bring shareholder value. Let’s dive in.

—Zia

If a company in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) needed money to expand, it would typically turn to a bank, development finance institution, or wealthy investors. A stock exchange creates a public marketplace where businesses can raise money from ordinary investors by selling shares in the company. That's what the DRC is trying to build.

What happened? The DRC has signed a partnership with the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank Group’s private-sector investment arm, to support the creation of the Kinshasa Stock Exchange, which would become the country's first stock market.

Doesn't every country have one of these? Not really, and even when countries have stock exchanges, getting them to thrive is another challenge entirely. Kenya went more than a decade without a major listing on its exchange, and South Africa's Johannesburg Stock Exchange has spent recent years trying to reverse delistings.

There's still a lot of work to do: A bill creating the legal framework for the country's financial markets is still before the Senate. The DRC still needs regulators, settlement systems, brokers, auditors, listing rules, and the financial plumbing that enables buying and selling shares.

Whether you're Congolese or not, it's worth paying attention to: With a functioning stock exchange, the hope is that it could make it easier for local businesses to raise money for expansion and investing in new projects. For international investors, it could create a new way to invest directly and participate in the country's growth. The challenge DRC could face is ensuring enough businesses and investors decide its exchange is worth showing up to.

Kenyan cross-border payments fintech WapiPay hassecured a Money Services Business licence from FINTRAC, Canada's payments regulator, giving it its first regulated North American base. The licence covers foreign exchange, money transfers, and virtual currency transactions.

Some backstory: TC Dailycovered Chimoney, a fintech that shut down after four years because its capital couldn't keep pace with its regulatory footprint. WapiPay is walking into the same regulated environment after processing$500 million in remittances in its first 18 months of operation and building a payments network spanning Africa, Asia, the UK, the Caribbean, and now North America. 

Who is going to be happy: The Kenyan diaspora in Canada, who currently send money home through corridors that can incur up to 15-20% in FX losses, according to WapiPay's CEO. A regulated, lower-cost alternative just arrived. An interesting time for incumbent money transfer operators in the Canada-Kenya corridor who've been comfortable with those fees for years.

What’s next? The Canadian licence covers virtual currency transactions, quietly positioning WapiPay for a stablecoin-powered future at the same moment Tether, the fintech company that issues the Tether stablecoin (USDT), is investing in remittance rivals to do exactly that. WapiPay may be one step ahead.

African governments and crypto have an interesting relationship. First comes confusion, then concern, then attempts to make it disappear, sometimes restrictions, and eventually regulation. Zimbabwe has reached the final stage.

From the top: In 2018, Zimbabwe's central bank told financial institutions to stop facilitating cryptocurrency transactions, making it difficult for exchanges and crypto companies to operate through the formal banking system. But banning a technology and stopping people from using it are not the same thing; crypto trading moved to peer-to-peer platforms and informal channels.

What has happened now? Zimbabwe has introduced a new registration framework for crypto companies. Businesses that buy, sell, transfer, or safeguard digital assets will now need to register with the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), the country's anti-money-laundering agency. They will also pay registration fees and renew their licences annually.

Zimbabwe is not alone: Nigeria moved from restricting banks' involvement in crypto transactions to creating licensing frameworks for digital asset companies. South Africa now requires crypto firms to obtain licences from financial regulators, and Kenya is also advancing legislation to regulate virtual asset service providers (VASPs) after years of operating without a dedicated framework.

How it affects you: For Zimbabweans, clearer rules could encourage more crypto companies to enter the market and build products locally. That could mean more options for people using crypto for remittances, cross-border payments, savings, or access to dollar-denominated assets.

MTN isdeploying AI that turns its fibre cables into sensors, detecting vibrations from digging activity before a spade cuts the line, and usingautonomous AI agents to triage network faults and adjust parameters automatically. The target is to have repair windows that currently stretch to eight hours or more.

What’s really happening? A fibre-optic cable is a glass thread that carries internet traffic at the speed of light. When someone digs through one, accidentally or deliberately, your connection goes down, and an engineer has to physically locate and splice the break. In South Africa, wherefibre vandalism and accidental cable cuts are a persistent problem, that process regularly takes the better part of a day. MTN is now trying to make the cable itself the early-warning system—detecting the digging before the damage happens.

Why this matters beyond the tech: Network and IT operations account for 55% of MTN's operating expenses and nearly 80% of its capital expenditure. Every hour shaved off the repair window is money saved across a network spanning 19 African markets. MTN is targeting R30 billion ($1.84 billion) in AI value creation by 2030, and the most confident piece of that plan is using AI to run MTN itself more cheaply.MTN subscribers who've sat through eight-hour outages waiting for a technician to find a cut cable somewhere underground are about to be very happy.

Zoom out: MTN also plans to install GPUs at its African tower sites, turning the same hardware that runs your cellular network into edge AI infrastructure. The cable sensors are the smallest, most relatable piece of a much larger bet: that MTN becomes the compute layer underneath Africa's AI economy, not just its connectivity layer.