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“If I played you a track of music, could you tell if it was composed by a human or an artificial intelligence,” Tencent Africa CEO Brett Loubser asked an auditorium of people at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival’s digital conference, Creativate. Amazingly, nobody could. How AI and machine learning are being adapted for the most personal of skills – creativity – offer not only a fascinating...

In March 2007 in the most unlikely of places, a new era began for how us humans performed one of our most important activities: making payments. Until M-Pesa emerged in Kenya, financial transactions using the then rudimental 2G cellphones was extremely hard. Now, the grandfather of mobile money is part of a suite of offerings from its parent, Vodacom, which has a next-generation superapp of its ow...

Moya is often mistakenly compared to WhatsApp, the mega messaging app, when the more apt comparison is super app WeChat. Although its CEO Gour Lentell points out his datafree app’s biggest drawcard is free messaging – which is the thing they miss most when they run out of data, his research found. But Moya , which has 6.5m monthly active users, is also pivoting to fintech, launching its own mobile...

When two geeks tried to solve their own frustrations around rolling blackouts, they created a now-indispensable app called Eskom se Push . It now tells 2.5m South Africans every day what outages to expect from the power utility. Although the way Herman Maritz and Dan Wells have brought a county together, while demonstrating a key tenet of why innovation in Africa is better: innovation out of neces...

As investments lead for Flourish in Africa, Ameya Upadhyay has been helping build African unicorns for a decade. His acumen is as impressive as his success rate, including notable startups like Flutterwave and Lidya ( listen here ). He tells Stuff Studios editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak about “baking” an African unicorn – which he has done multiple times. His insights into investing in Africa, espec...

Arguably the most important step in digital and financial inclusion is getting people online in the first place. The largest provider of free public wifi in sub-Saharan Africa is BRCK , a truly remarkable Kenyan start-up that has grown from its revolutionary first BRCK v1 to a SupaBRCK to connect rural villages in Rwanda to its brilliant Moja free public wifi. Co-founder Erik Hersman, who also co-...

Sim Tshabalala is a modern-day Medici. Appearing like a conventional banker in his immaculate suit and tie, he's a deep-thinking man who understands the power of commerce to uplift the country, the role of arts in society and democracy. He’s also the CEO of Standard Bank, the largest financial institution in Africa, who isn’t afraid to compliment (and name-check) smaller competitors. He spoke to S...

With a valuation reportedly of $3bn, Nigeria's Flutterwave is one of the most successful – and inspiring – startups in Africa. Stuff Studios editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak spoke with its CEO and cofounder Olugbenga Agboola during a recent trip to Lagos, where he also interviewed Lidya co-founder Ercin Eksin. Read more on Stuff Studios.

Fintech app Shyft won a prestigious innovation award from global banking organisation Efma in Barcelona in 2016 before it even launched. The innovative forex app – which was the first to offer virtual credit cards in South Africa, about five years before they became mainstream – has grown significantly, adding investment. Having won a stream of awards – including a Stuff App Award – its head...

Naked's clever app took the insurance industry by storm when it launched, offering a fully digital way for consumers to insure their cars and homes. Most innovatively is Naked's option to turn off driving insurance when your car is parked at home. A sign of its success is how Naspers Foundry has invested R120m ($8.3m) investment in the AI-driven insurtech firm. Stuff Studios editor-in-chief Toby S...

Visa South Africa country manager Aldo Laubscher tells Stuff Studios editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak that despite Covid and its effects, the last two years have accelerated digitisation and digital ways of paying. Visa found that 51% of over-50s in the country used ecommerce for the first time. Visa, which has 3,3bn card credentials and processes 65,000 to 70,0000 transactions per second, is looking...

Andre de Ruyter is the most important businessman in South Africa today. If the Eskom CEO can’t deal with its debt, its notorious inefficiency, and the load-shedding problems, the whole country will suffer. Or suffer more. An explosion in Medupi the week of the interview, also can't help. Stuff editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak is more interested in how De Ruyter plans to turn Eskom into a modern powe...

Checker's Sixty60 delivery app was the hands-down winner grocery delivery was of Covid. Even before lockdown, I was a regular, and very happy, user of the app which promised your delivery within 60 minutes. It has been downloaded more than 1.5m times and, rather than take away jobs, its has created has created 2,870 new ones. It's a project run by Shoprite's chief of strategy and innovation Neil S...

Deep insight into the plumbing of banking and no legacy business model enable the latest challenger bank to offer zero fees and other canny innovations. Bank Zero co-founder and chairman Michael Jordaan is a strange combination of brilliant geek and humble venture capitalist, which is perhaps why his magic potion of a bank is already so intoxicating to South Africans weary of high bank fees. He sp...

Chris Anderson runs TED, arguably one of the most interesting companies in the world. It's a global phenomenon, presenting interesting talks on a range of subjects and has arguably defined a new era of public speaking and the way many people discover new subjects. These short, epigrammatic talks are now the gold standard for conferences and how knowledge can be shared in this video age of mobile d...