What do a mobile money user in Lusaka, a digital borrower in rural Kenya, a small business owner in Johannesburg, and a family sending remittances from London have in common? Each is caught in a structural friction that four new research papers now explain with unusual clarity. The papers – from Zambia, East Africa, the …

A bank in South Africa spent a decade and over a billion rand maintaining a core system built before the smartphone existed. A pan-African lender watched fintech competitors launch new products in weeks while its own development cycles stretched to eighteen months. A digital bank in Kenya discovered that 70 percent of its IT budget …

A central bank in a southern African country lost interbank payment operations for over a week. The central bank reported no observable financial losses. But the shutdown of the national payment system threatened to exacerbate systemic vulnerabilities and cause spillover effects to the macroeconomy. That incident, documented in a new IMF Working Paper, is not …

A Kenyan bank processes millions of real‑time payments daily. A South African insurer holds sensitive health and financial data on millions of policyholders. A Nigerian fintech manages user credentials, transaction histories, and biometric identifiers. Each is a target. Each operates in a region that the World Economic Forum now identifies as the most exposed to …

For years, the story of AI in banking followed a familiar pattern. A pilot here. A proof of concept there. A chatbot launched with great fanfare, then quietly abandoned. That era is ending. Three sources, published within weeks of each other in early 2026, tell the same story from different angles. Cognizant’s banking experts predict …

Two major global surveys landed within weeks of each other in early 2026. One asked CEOs about growth and investment. The other asked technology leaders about infrastructure and constraints. Read separately, they offer useful data points. Read together, they reveal something more valuable: a roadmap. The message for African financial services leaders is clear. Confidence in …

For nearly two decades, M‑PESA has done one thing better than almost any financial service on the continent. It put digital payments into the hands of ordinary Kenyans – market traders, boda boda riders, smallholder farmers, and salaried workers alike. Now, Safaricom is using that same infrastructure to solve a different problem: access to wealth creation. …

For years, a hidden tax has constrained African finance. A business in Lagos waits days for a cross-border payment, losing value along the way. A family in Soweto relies on informal funeral schemes and rotating savings clubs, entirely outside the formal banking system. These are not isolated failures. They are symptoms of two distinct, yet …

African financial leaders have long known that intra‑continental trade faces a hidden tax. A trader in Nairobi sending goods to Lagos waits up to seven business days for settlement. A small business in Accra converting cedis to dollars to euros to naira loses 7–8% of the transaction value along the way. An estimated $5 billion leaks out …

The future of banking demands more than digitisation – iTuring.ai delivers intelligent, trusted transformation with governance at its core. The banking industry is undergoing an extraordinary shift. As customer expectations evolve and regulatory frameworks tighten, financial institutions must rethink how they operate, compete, and grow. This transformation requires more than digital tools – it demands …