👨🏿‍🚀 Daily – Pep goes core on banking |

Happy almost weekend.

Busha, the Nigerian crypto startup, pulled off something impressive recently: it launched its Digital Assets Innovation, Industry, Regulation and Compliance (DAIIRC) course in partnership with Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and A&D Forensics, a blockchain forensics company, to train financial executives. Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer, also joined the effort, helping deepen the programme’s focus on real-world crypto compliance. 

If you work in finance or digital asset compliance, this is one programme worth keeping on your radar. Head here to learn more about the course or send an email to [email protected] to get started.

Let’s dive in.

Pepkor, South Africa’s biggest clothing retailer, has pulled the ultimate “don’t let them guess your next move” plot by planning to drop a bank instead of a new fashion line, according to Bloomberg.

Here’s what happened: The retail company will use its 6,000-store network within the country to offer financial services to lower-income customers. This plan, which is still in discussion, would see the retailer team up with Investec, an international bank and wealth manager, to launch what could be called ‘Pep Bank’ and split profits. Investec holds a South African banking licence and could provide cover for Pepkor to become a digital bank. With access to digital financial infrastructure, we could soon see Pepkor offer savings and even financing options to customers.

Is this a trend? African retailers are catching the banking bug. In September, Shoprite announced plans to introduce financial tools and payment services to South Africans from its grocery aisles.

Fashion to finance; how does that even work? Pepkor already serves millions of low-income customers who walk through its doors weekly. When you add years of observing behavioural data from clothing and mobile sales, you suddenly have a retailer that may know more about its customers than many banks do. 

Additionally, rolling out services in already existing stores, where it has built trust with customers, is an added perk. More importantly, money! South Africa’s apparel market revenue reached $6.03 billion in 2025, according to Statista. The combined tier-1 capital of the country’s banking sector crossed $42.2 billion in 2022, far richer and stickier.

The infrastructure for an underwater superhighway built to connect Africa to the global digital grid has been completed. 

What is this “superhighway”? It’s 2Africa, a subsea broadband cable system built to circle about 33 African countries and plug it directly into Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia to move huge amounts of internet traffic, cut down latency, lower costs, and give the continent the kind of bandwidth that powers cloud services, AI, and data centres, and next-gen networks. 

This project is led by Meta, the Big Tech giant, in partnership with several companies, including MTN’s Bayobab, Vodafone Group, Center3, Orange, China Mobile International (CMI), Telecom Egypt, and West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC) group, plus regional partners like Equinix’s MainOne and Bharti Airtel for specific segments. 

What’s so special about the cable? 2Africa, which is 45,000km long, will support 21 terabits per second (tbps) per fibre pair, with eight fibre pairs on the trunk, totalling 168tbps. If you’re not fluent in infrastructure-speak, this simply means that the subsea cable is carrying insane levels of high-internet traffic that will boost connectivity speeds across several countries. 

Meta says the internet speed will be fast enough to stream more than 36 million HD movies at once—no glitch, no weird loads. Wow. Okay, Meta.

Why should you care? 2Africa is a good thing because it will provide stronger connectivity for enterprise use and force healthier competition with existing infrastructure providers. Cities like Lagos, Nairobi, and Cape Town will have the ability to support millions of high-bandwidth users without congestion. Startups will also have room to scale, and governments will get infrastructure that can support modern digital services.

More importantly, the infrastructure is open-access, meaning that anyone who qualifies, and not just the companies involved in building it, can buy capacity.

Founded in 2017 amid South Africa’s most intense load-shedding years, electrotech startup Plentify has just secured a Series A round, bringing its total funding close to $15 million.

With fresh funding, Plentify wants to take its AI-driven solution global, setting its sights on the UK, Australia, and Brazil, markets wrestling with grid congestion and the limits of renewable energy.

Smart energy funding in Africa is accelerating, fuelled by a mix of international grants, venture capital, and major public and private initiatives supporting early-stage startups and large-scale renewable projects. Plentify is among the startups thriving in this space, leveraging AI to optimise household energy use and stand out in a crowded market.

Plentify claims that its system does not just cut bills, it shifts energy use to cleaner, cheaper times, saving households millions while easing pressure on fragile grids. Built and battle-tested in the country’s toughest energy lab, load-shedding, Plentify claims it has already scaled tenfold since 2023. With partners like Balwin Properties and Wetility, it now remotely manages nearly 100 MWh of household energy, saving 9.9 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity and over R40 million ($2.3 million) in costs.

As the startup expands, all eyes will be on how it adapts to new markets, scales operations, maintains financial sustainability, and proves its impact on household wallets and global grid stability. Innovation born in crisis is now ready for the world stage.

Paystack introduces Pay with Pesalink in Kenya!

With Pesalink and Paystack, businesses in Kenya can now get paid directly from customer bank accounts. Learn more here

For the average African, the AI era has been mostly about a smarter chatbot. You ask a question, and it gives a good but generic answer. But Google’s launch of Gemini 3, its “most intelligent model yet,” is a shift from an AI assistant to an AI agent.

Why this matters: The model can now take a complex, multi-step goal and autonomously plan and execute it across different apps. Imagine telling your Gemini app to help you book a mid-size SUV for your trip. It will check your email for flight dates, compare rental options, and prepare the booking.

Kabelo Makwane, Google South Africa’s country director, said Gemini 3 will democratise access and job creation.

Between the lines: Gemini 3 Pro is being integrated into Google Search from day one, transforming it from a static information tool into an interactive learning companion. If you’re a student struggling with physics, you won’t just read about the three-body problem; you’ll interact with a real-time simulation. Given the 80% surge in South African searches for “AI jobs” and “AI course” in the last year, this tool becomes a critical, accessible self-learning engine.

Zoom out: Google also introduced Google Antigravity, a new development platform that turns the AI into an active partner. It autonomously plans, executes, and fixes bugs across complex software tasks. This approach is a massive productivity multiplier for the continent’s booming developer ecosystem, allowing them to focus on strategic ideas rather than tedious feature development.

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The World Wide Web3

Source:

Coin Name	Current Value	Day	Month
Bitcoin	$92,571	+ 2.25%	– 14.16%
Ether	$3,035	+ 0.97%	– 21.39%
XRP	$2.13	– 0.16%	– 12.08%
Solana	$143.75	+ 4.43%	– 21.75%

* Data as of 06.45 AM WAT, November 20, 2025.

Written by: Opeyemi Kareem, Sakhile Dube, and Fancy Goodman

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu & Ganiu Oloruntade