Posts

Bard Santner wants to turn Zimbabwe’s diaspora remittances into a banking business

Image
  Ngonidzashe Chikowore, managing director of Bard Santner Microfinance Bank, which received a deposit-taking microfinance banking licence effective 1 October 2026 to expand into savings, lending and other financial services. Image source: Bard Santner Share Bard Santner , a financial services group offering asset management, corporate finance, wealth management, and remittance services, is positioning itself to capture a larger share of Zimbabwe’s $2.45 billion diaspora market . Through its newly licenced deposit-taking microfinance bank, the firm is attempting a structural shift: moving beyond zero-margin transactional transfers into high-yield lending, wealth management, and deposit mobilisation. The strategic core of this expansion is customer lifetime value. Pure-play remittance companies face severe price compression, but by bundling credit and savings onto existing cross-border flows, Bard Santner aims to convert transactional users into long-term banking clients. However, a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Eva Ngigi Sarwari, Equity’s head of payments, dies on business trip to China

Image
  Share Eva Ngigi Sarwari, managing director of Finserve Africa and Equity Group’s director of payments and international banking, has died aged 45 while on a business trip to China, according to a statement from her colleagues. Her death cuts short a career that spanned over two decades in banking and payments, from introducing customers to electronic banking at Co-operative Bank of Kenya to leading Visa’s business across three East African markets. “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our dear friend and colleague, Eva Ngigi Sarwari,” her colleagues said in the statement on Tuesday. They described the news as a “sudden and profound shock” and said they would make further updates as details became available. The statement did not disclose the cause or date of her death. Sarwari joined Equity in January 2025 as group director for payments and international banking, with responsibility for executing the bank’s payments strategy across Africa. In April 2026, she...
Post a Comment
Read more

How curiosity took Victoria Abiodun from anatomy to crypto

Image
  Share Growing up in a household steeped in healthcare, Victoria Abiodun’s path seemed predetermined: finish her anatomy degree at the University of Ilorin, Kwara State, northcentral Nigeria, head abroad for medical school, and never look back. As for cryptocurrency? She wanted nothing to do with it, convinced it belonged firmly in the realm of internet scams. But when an ASUU strike collided with the 2020 lockdowns, a persistent anatomy coursemate challenged her prejudice. To make sense of the dense, jargon-laden whitepapers, she began writing her own explanations from scratch. That curiosity set off an unexpected chain reaction: from ghost-writing technical primers as an undergraduate to co-founding a gaming startup, spearheading marketing for a European decentralised identity protocol, and bootstrapping a 100-strong Solana developer chapter in Ilorin. Today, while reading for an MBA at USC and researching high-density energy demand, she is writing the open-access, plain-English...
Post a Comment
Read more

Reporters return to White House after weeklong ban

Image
  President Trump can’t keep CNN, MS NOW, and Politico off his US taxpayers’ lawn, at least for now. Nearly a week after he barred them from the White House, journalists from these outlets regained access yesterday following a judge’s early morning order to temporarily block Trump’s ban. To refresh: Trump announced last Friday that he was revoking White House credentials for CNN, MS NOW, and Politico (Politico and Morning Brew have the same parent company, Axel Springer), initially saying it was “a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” but later calling their reporting a national security risk. The outlets sued to get back in. Now, things are looking up for the press: “The Court is skeptical—at least on this record—that Defendants’ interest in safeguarding national security is the actual motivation for, or is even advanced by, the revocation” of the outlets’ press passes, US District Judge Timothy Kelly wrote : Kelly granted the outlets a 14-day restraining order agai...
Post a Comment
Read more