Business
Money 20/20 Highlights Fintech’s Role In Africa Access
At the start of Covid, large Fortune 500 companies began to leave the African financial markets, citing too much illiquidity and uncertainty. One Ireland-based startup, featured on this year’s Money 20/20 ‘Startup Spotlight’ session, built a solution.
Esca positions itself as a platform that enables stability and revenue protection within volatile and emerging markets. They are interested in the African markets and the difficulties institutions and banks have faced with growth and investment in an area prone to frequent market volatility.
CEO and founder, Shalom Osiadi, said: “A lot of these business were unable to actually acquire the hard currencies required to book the profits they had made in the country. For example, GlaxoSmithKline has existed in Nigeria since 1955, they generate all their revenue in the local currency: the naira. They book this revenue by a forward contract with the Central Bank of Nigeria. The Central Bank of Nigeria does not have enough foreign currencies to actually settle this debt that they have with these multinationals. And so businesses like GSK, they go to the parallel market to look for liquidity and then the parallel market is 3-500 naira above what the central bank rate base is, so they’re already losing a significant amount of profit margin just by trading on the spot.”
The concept of Esca is essentially to take this on-the-spot fragility and replace it with a predictable, stable platform that protects revenue and, by extension, reopens growth within the continent.
Osiadi explained this: “We have understood that financial engineering really is the key to these markets, right? Once we understand how the macroeconomic environment works, how the numbers work, we can easily translate that into code. So what we’re trying to do now is take our algorithms from Excel spreadsheets onto our platform.”
With a long-term vision to increase foreign direct investment in the continent, they recognise that it must be done in a safe, transparent, and predictable way. Restabilising investment into the area provides a number of challenges, fundamentally education and platform experience.
Speaking about the platform’s future, Olumide Olugbemiro, co-founder and CTO, said the user experience has to be consistently seamless: “To be honest, the more complicated it is, the more they don’t understand it, the more we have to jump on calls to explain. So, I’d say making the experience as seamless as possible, as easy and explanatory as possible.”
On education, Osiadi explained how “one of the biggest challenges we had and we still have at Esca is educating African finance managers, CEOs, and CFOs on why currency hedging is important for their business.[…] So you have to change the mindset slightly to let them understand that long-term gain is better than short-term accumulation.”
Part of their approach to encouraging investment has also included making cryptocurrency accessible to non-crypto firms. This educational point has been key to this; by simplifying the complex elements and focussing on using their own experience to allow users to send, for example, fiat currency to an account and receieve cryptocurrency in a wallet tomorrow.
Osiadi said “by using that experience, we’ve grown our business by over 300% in the last six months. We’re forecasted about $6 million in revenue this year. Based off of that knowledge that we’ve gained from an existing product we’ve built, we’re now translating it into complex products like derivatives.”
Finextra.com
Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) marketers have slashed depot prices, offering distributors lower wholesale rates and raising expectations that cooking gas refill costs could ease for Nigerian consumers in the weeks ahead.
Fresh market data showed that PPMC recorded the sharpest reduction, cutting its depot price to N1,010/kg, a 0.69%.
Rainoil Lagos followed with reduction, bringing its depot price down to N1,030/kg. NIPCO Lagos held its rate steady at N1,025/kg, data from petroluemprice.ng show.
The only marketer to move in the opposite direction was Matrix Warri, which is N1,100/kg.
The new cooking gas depot prices are:
PPMC: N1,010/kg
NIPCO Lagos: N1,025/kg
Rainoil Lagos: N1,030/kg
Matrix Warri: N1,100/k
Industry sources attributed the downward movement to greater competition among suppliers and improved product availability at the wholesale level.
Presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress ADC, Atiku Abubakar, has demanded that the National Assembly (NASS) immediately conduct a comprehensive forensic review of the 2026 Appropriation Act, following revelations of over ₦210 billion in overlapping and duplicated allocations in the budget.
In a statement by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, Atiku said the revelation, coming alongside Nigeria’s poor showing on nearly 90 percent of globally recognised prosperity indicators, exposes the Tinubu administration as one of the most fiscally reckless governments in Nigeria’s democratic history.
“For more than three years, Nigerians have been subjected to relentless hardship. They were told that fuel subsidy removal, exchange rate unification, higher taxes and rising tariffs were bitter pills that would eventually restore economic stability. Yet today, the same government cannot explain how more than ₦210 billion found its way into duplicated and overlapping budget provisions,” he said.
He linked the finding to what he called a growing pattern of questionable budget practices, citing allocations for projects outside agencies’ statutory mandates and insertions running into billions of naira.
The former vice president also cited the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation NNPC Limited’s audited 2024 financial statements, which he said showed ₦7.13 trillion spent on “Energy Security Expenses” — what NNPC itself identifies as petrol subsidy — despite claims that subsidy had been removed in 2023.
Atiku argued that this fiscal indiscipline is reflected in declining living standards, noting that families are skipping meals, small businesses are shutting down, and graduates cannot find jobs, even as government celebrates selective economic indicators.
He also urged the Auditor-General of the Federation, anti-corruption agencies and civil society organisations to independently scrutinise the budget, identify officials responsible for the duplicated allocations, and ensure all improperly appropriated funds are recovered.
Atiku pledged that an ADC administration would restore credibility to public finance through transparent budgeting, zero-based expenditure planning, digital public expenditure tracking and strict personal accountability for public officers.
“When the owner of the barn invites goats to keep watch over his harvest, he should not be surprised when hunger follows abundance. Nigeria deserves custodians of her commonwealth, not Bourdillon caretakers of waste,” he added.
The Director-General of the National Pension Commission (PenCom), Omolola Oloworaran, has explained how a retired factory worker’s monthly pension increased from N18,000 to N206,000 after the Federal Government carried out pension reforms under President Bola Tinubu’s administration.
The PenCom boss shared the story while speaking on the impact of the reforms, saying the increase reflects the government’s commitment to improving the welfare of retirees.
She said the retiree received a pension alert earlier in the day showing the increased payment.
“Early this morning, somewhere in Nigeria, a retired factory worker checked the alert on his phone. For 21 years, that alert read ₦18,000. This month, as in every single month now, it reads N206,000,” she said.
Oloworaran said the increase was not a gift but the result of the government’s decision to meet its obligations to retired workers.
“He did not win a lottery. He was not given anything he had not already earned. What changed was simple. His country decided to keep its promise,” she added.
According to Oloworaran, the improvement is not limited to one person, as hundreds of thousands of pensioners across the country are benefiting from the reforms.
She credited the progress to President Bola Tinubu’s commitment to workers and vulnerable Nigerians, saying the administration has focused on policies that improve the welfare of retirees.
“Work has been made easy because we have a president that is passionate about the Nigerian people, passionate about vulnerable Nigerians, and doing everything in its power to make sure that it puts more money in the hands of the average Nigerian,” she said.
The PenCom Director-General added that the administration’s record on pension welfare over the past two years reflects the impact of the reforms.
She said, “Today, standing before you with 24 months of evidence, I can say that that case is no longer emerging. It is on the record. Because history is rarely defined by one decision. It is defined by a pattern of decisions.”
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