Tyme for Sanlam to try banking

South Africa’s lending market is about to welcome a new player. Sanlam, one of Africa's largest insurers, is teaming up with TymeBank, the digital bank owned by the unicorn Tyme Group, to propose a joint venture that will launch a new banking platform offering personal loans bundled with insurance cover. 

The move pushes Sanlam into the retail banking sector, as the insurer looks to diversify revenue by tapping the credit market.

State of play: Sanlam will test its new offerings later this year, with a full rollout by mid-2026.. The firm will offer unsecured personal loans with credit life insurance, allowing clients to borrow while protecting those loans at the same time.

As part of the deal, Tymebank will also acquire half of Sanlam’s loan book, giving it a quick foothold in South Africa’s unsecured loans market.

But it’s not just about banking, competition matters: Sanlam’s move into banking will put it directly in competition with incumbents like Capitec, which operates across both banking and insurance, and new players like Old Mutual, which launched OM Bank on August 29.

The big picture: Traditional insurers are under pressure to retain customers by broadening their financial offerings. The result could be fiercer competition, better deals, and wider access to last-mile banking solutions.

Although it started as one of Africa’s foremost mobile money services, the line between mobile money and traditional banking is blurring for Kenya’s M-PESA. Safaricom, the country’s biggest telco and owner of M-PESA, which dominates the market with around 90% share, is now targeting high-value transactions for businesses to lure them away from banks with higher transaction limits.

State of play: Safaricom has raised M-PESA's bank transfer limit to KES 500,000 ($3,850) per transaction through its PesaLink mini app, doubling the previous cap of KES 250,000 ($1,925). PesaLink, operated by the Kenya Bankers Association (KBA), connects local banks and allows instant money transfers between accounts, turning M-PESA into an interbank payment bridge.

Still limited outside PesaLink: Regular M-PESA transfers between users remain capped at the usual KES 250,000 ($1,925) per transaction. The KES 500,000 ($3,850) limit only applies to bank transfers through the PesaLink integration.

Why does this matter? More than 675,000 businesses processed payments through Lipa Na M-PESA, Safaricom’s mobile payment platform, reaching KES 1.974 trillion ($15.2 billion) for the year ended March 2025, making this one of its fastest-growing offerings. The higher limits on PesaLink make M-PESA even more practical for SMEs and corporations managing larger payment volumes.

The big picture: With M-PESA supporting higher-limit transfers via PesaLink, it’s no longer just an app to send pocket money to friends and family; it can become a key tool for SMEs and corporations, changing how businesses can move money across the country.

After much back and forth, South Africa’s Competition Tribunal has finally cleared Blu Label Unlimited Group, through its unit The Prepaid Company (TPC), to take control of Cell C—one of South Africa’s largest telecoms operators with a long history of debts and bailouts.

The tribunal bumped TPC’s stake by 4.04%, enough to increase its shareholding from a non-controlling 49.53% stake to 53.57%.

The notorious debtor: Blue Label Group, has bailed out Cell C several times. In 2020, when the mobile operator defaulted on the payment of capital on its $184 million loan, Blue Label pumped over $56 million into the operator. In February, the prepaid service company revealed that it is in the process of repaying Cell C’s debt worth up to $15 million. In 2022, Cell C recorded a loss of nearly $150 million and has been recapitalised a few times; still, Blue Label has injected over $312 million into the company.

Blue Label clearly wants Cell C to work, maybe even more than Cell C does.

The restructuring: This plan involves converting $210 million of debt into equity, shifting billions of assets into Cell C, and rolling out a new incentive scheme to keep management aligned. See it as a financial detox to keep Cell C leaner and more attractive to investors.

Why it matters: For Cell C, this is another shot at survival. For Blu Label, it means the company is going all in. Cell C’s success or failure now sits squarely in its books. And with all the cash injections and investments the prepaid company has made into the telecom operator, failure is unthinkable.

Nigeria’s Central Bank (CBN) has a new sheriff in town. A Compliance Department with the job of cleaning up the cracks in Nigeria’s financial system. 

The new department will handle everything that regulators struggle to catch up with, including fraud, dodgy adverts, weak corporate governance, data protection, and all the grey areas some fintechs love to play in.

Why now? Fraud cases in Nigeria have exploded, up 45% within a year, with 70% of the losses traced back to digital channels, mostly unregulated crypto and digital payment channels. The CBN has been on edge, dropping new regulations like hot yams. Just weeks ago, the regulator ordered geo-tagging of all POS machines to keep them within the stipulated 10-meter operational radius. 

In December 2024, CBN set a daily limit of ₦1.2 million ($785) per point of sale (PoS) agent and capped withdrawals at ₦100,000 ($65) per customer to curb fraud and promote a cashless economy. All these directives push Nigeria’s payment ecosystem into a safer lane.

The department will likely demand more reporting from fintechs and banks, requesting transaction data and even board governance reviews. Its work may mean a closer scrutiny of new products and tighter audits.

For financial institutions, this is another office breathing down their neck. But for Nigeria’s payment system, this is a bet by the apex bank that tougher oversight will finally rebuild trust in the sector and reduce fraud incidents.