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Alastair Mitchell is a partner at multi-stage VC fund EQT Ventures and the fund's B2B sales, marketing and SaaS expert. Ali also focuses on helping US companies scale into Europe and vice versa.
Fintech companies are fundamentally changing how the financial services ecosystem operates, giving consumers powerful tools to help with savings, budgeting, investing, insurance, electronic payments and many other offerings. This industry is growing rapidly, filling gaps where traditional banks and financial institutions have failed to meet customer needs.
Yet progress has been uneven. Notably, consumer fintech adoption in the United States lags well behind much of Europe, where forward-thinking regulation has sparked an outpouring of innovation in digital banking services — as well as the backend infrastructure onto which products are built and operated.
That might seem counterintuitive, as regulation is often blamed for stifling innovation. Instead, European regulators have focused on reducing barriers to fintech growth rather than protecting the status quo. For example, the U.K.’s Open Banking regulation requires the country’s nine big high-street banks to share customer data with authorized fintech providers.
The EU’s PSD2 (Payment Services Directive 2) obliges banks to create application programming interfaces (APIs) and related tools that let customers share data with third parties. This creates standards that level the playing field and nurture fintech innovation. And the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority supports new fintech entrants by running a “sandbox” for software testing that helps speed new products into service.
Regulations, if implemented effectively as demonstrated by those in Europe, will lead to a net positive to consumers. While it is inevitable that regulations will come, if fintech entrepreneurs take the action to engage early and often with regulators, it will ensure that the regulations put in place support innovation and ultimately benefit the consumer.
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Alastair Mitchell is a partner at multi-stage VC fund EQT Ventures and the fund's B2B sales, marketing and SaaS expert. Ali also focuses on helping US companies scale into Europe and vice versa.
Fintech companies are fundamentally changing how the financial services ecosystem operates, giving consumers powerful tools to help with savings, budgeting, investing, insurance, electronic payments and many other offerings. This industry is growing rapidly, filling gaps where traditional banks and financial institutions have failed to meet customer needs.
Yet progress has been uneven. Notably, consumer fintech adoption in the United States lags well behind much of Europe, where forward-thinking regulation has sparked an outpouring of innovation in digital banking services — as well as the backend infrastructure onto which products are built and operated.
That might seem counterintuitive, as regulation is often blamed for stifling innovation. Instead, European regulators have focused on reducing barriers to fintech growth rather than protecting the status quo. For example, the U.K.’s Open Banking regulation requires the country’s nine big high-street banks to share customer data with authorized fintech providers.
The EU’s PSD2 (Payment Services Directive 2) obliges banks to create application programming interfaces (APIs) and related tools that let customers share data with third parties. This creates standards that level the playing field and nurture fintech innovation. And the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority supports new fintech entrants by running a “sandbox” for software testing that helps speed new products into service.
Regulations, if implemented effectively as demonstrated by those in Europe, will lead to a net positive to consumers. While it is inevitable that regulations will come, if fintech entrepreneurs take the action to engage early and often with regulators, it will ensure that the regulations put in place support innovation and ultimately benefit the consumer.
Wrist-worn fitness trackers tend to do a fine job when exercising outdoors. For those glued to gym equipment, however, things get trickier. GPS can’t really do its job detecting distances, and machines like the elliptic tend to be even trickier.
Recent generations of the Apple Watch and WatchOS have worked to bridge the gap, with more sophisticated workout detection and the addition of GymKit in 2017. With the latter, Apple started working with equipment manufactures to ditch the 30-pin iPod machines for newer models that worked with Apple’s detection.
This week, the company takes a step further by partnering with the gyms themselves. The new Apple Watch Connected program will launch with four partners. It’s a pretty diverse quartet, ranging from old-school to boutique, including Orangetheory, Basecamp, YMCA and Crunch Fitness. And like GymKit before it, there’s a pretty good chance it will take a while to make it to your neighborhood workout facility, unless you live in a handful of metro areas, including Manhattan and the Twin Cities.
The program is designed to further bridge the gap between life inside and outside of the gym. It’s basically a four-legged stool, including GymKit-enabled equipment, an Apple Watch and iOS app (developed with Apple), accepting Apple Pay and, perhaps, most interesting of the bunch, “incentive programs.”
How each chain opts to participate is up to the specifics of their own business model. Most notably, GymKit machines may not always be applicable, as in the case of Orangetheory, whose workouts are built around machine-shifting interval training. As such, the GymKit logging ultimately makes less sense.
Getting back to the incentive program, that, too, will vary a bit, depending on the nature of the deal with the gym. Take Orangetheory. Here you can can basically use activity to earn stuff like Nike and Apple gift cards. In the case of Crunch, you can earn deductions from your fees, up to $300 over two years. At YMCA, earnings go to “community initiatives,” while Basecamp’s go back to paying off the value of the Apple Watch Series 5 GPS the gym provides.
All in all, seems like a win-win for all parties. Apple gets more active engagement in a small but growing concentrated number of gyms, and gyms get to list an Apple partnership among their perks. GymKit partners, meanwhile, are set to sell a bunch more machines. There are somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 GymKit machines currently out there, a list that doesn’t include recently announced partners like Woodway, Octane and TRUE Fitness.
Internet services company Opera has come under a short-sell assault based on allegations of predatory lending practices by its fintech products in Africa.
Hindenburg Research issued a report claiming (among other things) that Opera’s finance products in Nigeria and Kenya have run afoul of prudent consumer practices and Google Play Store rules for lending apps.
Hindenburg — which is based in NYC and managed by financial analyst Nate Anderson — went on to suggest Opera’s U.S. listed stock was grossly overvalued.
That’s a primer on the key info, though there are several additional shades of the who, why, and where of this story to break down, before getting to what Opera and Hindenburg had to say.
A good start is Opera’s ownership and scope. Founded in Norway, the company is an internet services provider, largely centered around its Opera browser.
Two years later, Opera went public in an IPO on NASDAQ, where its shares currently trade.
Though Opera’s web platform isn’t widely used in the U.S. — where it has less than 1% of the browser market — it has been number-one in Africa, and more recently a distant second to Chrome, according to StatCounter.
On the back of its browser popularity, Opera went on an African venture-spree in 2019, introducing a suite of products and startup verticals in Nigeria and Kenya, with intent to scale more broadly across the continent.
In Nigeria these include motorcycle ride-hail service ORide and delivery app OFood.
Central to these services are Opera’s fintech apps: OPay in Nigeria and OKash and Opesa in Kenya — which offer payment and lending options.
Fintech focused VC and startups have been at the center of a decade long tech-boom in several core economies in Africa, namely Kenya and Nigeria.
In 2019 Opera led a wave of Chinese VC in African fintech, including $170 million in two rounds to its OPay payments service in Nigeria.
Opera’s fintech products in Africa (as well as Opera’s Cashbean in India) are at the core of Hindenburg Research’s brief and short-sell position.
The crux of the Hindenburg report is that due to the declining market-share of its browser business, Opera has pivoted to products generating revenue from predatory short-term loans in Africa and India at interest rates of 365 to 876%, so Hindenburg claims.
The firm’s reporting goes on to claim Opera’s payment products in Nigeria and Kenya are afoul of Google rules.
“Opera’s short-term loan business appears to be…in violation of the Google Play Store’s policies on short-term and misleading lending apps…we think this entire line of business is at risk of…being severely curtailed when Google notices and ultimately takes corrective action,” the report says.
Based on this, Hindenburg suggested Opera’s stock should trade at around $2.50, around a 70% discount to Opera’s $9 share-price before the report was released on January 16.
Hindenburg also disclosed the firm would short Opera.
Founder Nate Anderson confirmed to TechCrunch Hindenburg continues to hold short positions in Opera’s stock — which means the firm could benefit financially from declines in Opera’s share value. The company’s stock dropped some 18% the day the report was published.
On motivations for the brief, “Technology has catalyzed numerous positive changes in Africa, but we do not think this is one of them,” he said.
“This report identified issues relating to one company, but what we think will soon become apparent is that in the absence of effective local regulation, predatory lending is becoming pervasive across Africa and Asia…proliferated via mobile apps,” Anderson added.
While the bulk of Hindenburg’s critique was centered on Opera, Anderson also took aim at Google.
“Google has become the primary facilitator of these predatory lending apps by virtue of Android’s dominance in these markets. Ultimately, our hope is that Google steps up and addresses the bigger issue here,” he said.
TechCrunch has an open inquiry into Google on the matter. In the meantime, Opera’s apps in Nigeria and Kenya are still available on GooglePlay, according to Opera and a cursory browse of the site.
For its part, Opera issued a rebuttal to Hindenburg and offered some input to TechCrunch through a spokesperson.
In a company statement opera said, “We have carefully reviewed the report published by the short seller and the accusations it put forward, and our conclusion is very clear: the report contains unsubstantiated statements, numerous errors, and misleading conclusions regarding our business and events related to Opera.”
Opera added it had proper banking licenses in Kenyan or Nigeria. “We believe we are in compliance with all local regulations,” said a spokesperson.
TechCrunch asked Hindenburg’s Nate Anderson if the firm had contacted local regulators related to its allegations. “We reached out to the Kenyan DCI three times before publication and have not heard back,” he said.
As it pertains to Africa’s startup scene, there’ll be several things to follow surrounding the Opera, Hindenburg affair.
The first is how it may impact Opera’s business moves in Africa. The company is engaged in competition with other startups across payments, ride-hail, and several other verticals in Nigeria and Kenya. Being accused of predatory lending, depending on where things go (or don’t) with the Hindenburg allegations, could put a dent in brand-equity.
There’s also the open question of if/how Google and regulators in Kenya and Nigeria could respond. Contrary to some perceptions, fintech regulation isn’t non-existent in both countries, neither are regulators totally ineffective.
Kenya passed a new data-privacy law in November and Nigeria recently established guidelines for mobile-money banking licenses in the country, after a lengthy Central Bank review of best digital finance practices.
Nigerian regulators demonstrated they are no pushovers with foreign entities, when they slapped a $3.9 billion fine on MTN over a regulatory breach in 2015 and threatened to eject the South African mobile-operator from the country.
As for short-sellers in African tech, they are a relatively new thing, largely because there are so few startups that have gone on to IPO.
In 2019, Citron Research head and activist short-seller Andrew Left — notable for shorting Lyft and Tesla — took short positions in African e-commerce company Jumia, after dropping a report accusing the company of securities fraud. Jumia’s share-price plummeted over 50% and has only recently begun to recover.
As of Wednesday, there were signs Opera may be shaking off Hindenburg’s report — at least in the market — as the company’s shares had rebounded to $7.35.
Nigerian digital payments startup Paga has acquired Apposit, a software development company based in Ethiopia, for an undisclosed amount.
That’s just part of Paga’s news. The Lagos based startup will also launch its payment products in Mexico this year and in Ethiopia imminently, CEO Tayo Oviosu told TechCrunch
The moves come a little over a year after Paga raised a $10 million Series B round and Oviosu announced the company’s intent to expand globally, while speaking at Disrupt San Francisco.
Paga will leverage Apposit — which is U.S. incorporated but operates in Addis Ababa — to support that expansion into East Africa and Latin America.
Repat founders
Behind the acquisition is a story threaded with serendipity, return, and collaboration.
Both Paga and Apposit were founded by repatriate entrepreneurs. Oviosu did his MBA at Stanford University and worked at Cisco Systems before returning to Nigeria.
Apposit CEO Adam Abate moved back to Ethiopia 17 years ago for an assignment in the country’s Ministry of Finance, after studying at Brown University and working in fintech in New York.
“I put together a team…to build…public financial management systems for the country. And during the process…brought in my best friend Eric Chijioke…to be a technical engineer,” said Abate.
The two teamed up with Simon Solomon in 2007 to co-found Apposit, with a focus on building large-scale enterprise software for Africa.
Apposit partners (L-R) Adam Abate, Simon Solomon, Eric Chijioke, Gideon Abate
A year later, Oviosu met Chijioke when he crashed at his house while visiting Ethiopia for a wedding. It just so happened Chijioke’s brother was his roommate at Stanford.
That meeting began an extended conversation between the two on digital-finance innovation in Africa and eventually led to a Paga partnership with Apposit in 2010.
Apposit dedicated an engineering team to build Paga’s payment platform, Eric Chijioke became Paga’s CTO (while maintaining his Apposit role) and Apposit backed Paga.
“We aligned ourselves as African entrepreneurs…which then developed into a close relationship where we became…investors in Paga and strategically aligned,” said Abate.
African roots, global ambitions
Fast forward a decade, and the two companies have come pretty far. Apposit has grown its business into a team of 63 engineers and technicians and has racked up a list of client partnerships. The company helped digitize the Ethiopian Commodities Exchange and has contracted on IT and software solutions with banks non-profits and brick and mortar companies.
For a decade, Apposit has also supported Paga’s payment product development.
Over that period, Oviosu and team went to work building Paga’s platform and driving digital payment adoption in Nigeria, home to Africa’s largest economy and population of 200 million.
That’s been no small task considering Nigeria’s percentage of unbanked was pegged as high as at 70% in 2011 and still lingers around 60%, according to The Global Findex database.
Paga has created a multi-channel network to transfer money, pay-bills, and buy things digitally. The company has 14 million customers in Nigeria who can transfer funds from one of Paga’s 24,411 agents or through the startup’s mobile apps.
Paga products work on iOS, Android, and basic USSD phones using a star, hashtag option. The company has remittance partnerships with the likes of Western Union and allows for third-party integration of its app.
Since inception, the startup has processed 104 million transactions worth $6.6 billion, according to Oviosu.
With the acquisition, Paga absorbs Apposit’s tech capabilities and team of 63 engineers. The company will direct its boosted capabilities and total workforce of 530 to support expansion.
Paga plans its Mexico launch in 2020, according to Oviosu.
Adam Abate is now CEO of Paga Ethiopia, where Paga plans to go live as soon as it gains a local banking license. The East African nation of 100 million, with the continent’s seventh largest economy, is bidding to become Africa’s next startup hub, though it still lags the continent’s tech standouts — like Nigeria and Kenya — in startup formation, ISP options and VC.
Ethiopia has also been slow to adopt digital finance, with less than 1% of the population using mobile-money, compared to 73% for Kenya, Africa’s mobile-payments leader.
Paga aims to shift the financial needle in the country. “The goal is straight-forward. We want Ethiopians to use the Paga wallet as their payment account. So it’s about digitizing cash transactions and driving financial services,” said Oviosu.
Paga CEO Tayo Oviosu
With the Apposit acquisition and country expansion, he also looks to grow Paga’s model in Africa and beyond, as an emerging markets fintech solution.
“There are several very large countries around the world in Africa, Latin America, Asia where these [financial inclusion] problems still exist. So our strategy is not an African strategy…We want to go where these problems exist in a large way and build a global payments business,” Oviosu said.
Fintech competition in Nigeria
As it grows abroad, Paga faces greater competition in Nigeria. For the last decade, South Africa and Kenya — with the success of Safaricom’s M-Pesa product — have been Africa’s standouts in digital payments.
But over the last several years, Nigeria has become a magnet for VC and fintech startups. This trend reached a high-point in 2019 when Chinese investors put $220 million into Opera owned OPay and Transsion backed PalmPay — two fledgling startups with plans to scale in Nigeria and broader Africa.
That’s a hefty war chest compared to Paga’s total VC haul of $34 million, according to Crunchbase.
Oviosu names product market fit and benefits from the company’s expansion as factors that will keep it ahead of these well-funded new entrants.
“That’s where the world-class technology comes in,” he said.
“We also take a perspective that we cannot build every use-case,” he said — contrasting Paga’s model to Opera in Africa, which has launched multiple startup verticals around its OPay product, from ride-hailing to food-delivery.
Oviosu compares Paga’s approach to PayPal, which allows third-party developers to shape businesses around PayPal as the payment solution.
With its Apposit acquisition and plans for continued expansion, PayPal may become more than a model for Paga.
Founder Tayo Oviosu sees big fintech players, such as PayPal and Alipay, as future competitors with Paga’s planned expansion into more emerging markets.
Apple has scored more big names for its newly launched streaming service, Apple TV+, including “Veep” and “Seinfeld” star Julia Louis-Dreyfus, as well as Meryl Streep, the latter who’s attached to an animated short film about Earth Day, set to premiere on April 17. In addition, Apple has now announced several new series for Apple TV+, plus renewals and premiere dates for others.
The upcoming Earth Day film, titled “Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth” will also star the voice talents of “Room” actor Jacob Tremblay as a 7-year old child who learns about the planet, and Chris O’Dowd and Ruth Negga as his parents. Streep will provide the voiceover narration.
Meanwhile, Louis-Dreyfus hasn’t announced specific details of her projects. Apple says she’s inked an overall deal with Apple TV+ as both an executive producer and star — her first overall deal with a streaming service. Under the multi-year agreement, Louis-Dreyfus will create multiple new projects exclusively for Apple TV+.
Joked the actress: “I am thrilled about this new partnership with my friends at Apple. Also, many thanks and kudos to my representatives for structuring the deal in such a way that I am paid in AirPods,” she said.
Apple has previously signed other overall deals with names like Alfonso Cuaron, Kerry Ehrin, Jon M. Chu, Justin Lin, Jason Katims, Lee Eisenberg, as well as studios A24 and Imagine Documentaries, and Oprah.
In addition to the big-name talent grabs, Apple also on Friday announced a new documentary series, “Dear…,” from Emmy and Peabody winner R.J. Cutler. Due out this spring, the series will profile internationally known leaders including Oprah Winfrey, Gloria Steinem, Spike Lee, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Yara Shahidi, Stevie Wonder, Aly Raisman, Misty Copeland, Big Bird (uh, what?) and others.
This is not Apple TV+’s first documentary. It’s currently airing the Peace Award winner “The Elephant Queen,” about a tribe of African elephants. And while not a documentary, per se, the service is also now featuring real life-inspired tales of immigrants in the U.S. in the Apple TV+ anthology series, “Little America” which have a documentary-like vibe. Other documentary series and films in the works include “Visible: Out on Television” “Home,” “Beastie Boys Story” and “Dads.”
Newly announced “Visible…,” exec-produced by Ryan White, Jessica Hargrave, Wanda Sykes, and Wilson Cruz focuses on the LGBTQ movement and its impact on television. Premiering on Valentine’s Day (Feb. 14), the series will also feature narration from Janet Mock, Margaret Cho, Asia Kate Dillon, Neil Patrick Harris, and Lena Waithe.
Another new show is “Central Park,” an animated musical comedy from Loren Bouchard (“Bob’s Burgers”), executive producer Josh Gad (“Frozen”) and executive producer Nora Smith (“Bob’s Burgers”), will arrive this summer. The show features a family that lives in Central Park, the Tillermans, and includes a voice cast with the talents of Josh Gad, Leslie Odom Jr., Kristen Bell, Kathryn Hahn, Tituss Burgess, Daveed Diggs, and Stanley Tucci. The animation style has the distinct look of “Bob’s Burgers” as well.
Apple’s first original series from the U.K., “Trying,” will premiere on May 1st globally. This series stars Rafe Spall and Esther Smith, hails from BBC Studios, and was written by Andy Wolton. As the name hints, the story is about a couple — Jason and Nikki — who are trying to have a baby. But Apple describes the show’s larger theme as one about “growing up, settling down and finding someone to love.”
A new thriller, “Defending Jacob,” based on the 2012 NYT bestseller of the same name, will premiere April 24.
The limited series stars Chris Evans, Michelle Dockery, Jaeden Martell, Cherry Jones, Pablo Schreiber, Betty Gabriel, and Sakina Jaffrey, and tells of a shocking crime that rocks a small Massachusetts town. The story follows an Assistant District Attorney who is torn between duty to uphold justice and his love for his son. Academy Award winner J.K. Simmons guest stars.
Apple also announced its live-action comedy that follows a team of video game developers, “Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet,” has been renewed for a second season ahead of its global premiere date of Feb. 7.
The show was co-created by Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day and Megan Ganz, and also stars McElhenney as the fictional company’s creative director, Ian Grimm.
Other shows awarded a second season include “Little America,” “Dickinson,” “See,” “Servant,” “For All Mankind,” “The Morning Show,” and the soon-to-premiere “Home Before Dark.”
Despite not sharing any sort of viewership data — even with the shows’ stars — the renewals speak to Apple’s confidence in its original programming.
“Home Before Dark” is a dramatic mystery series featuring young investigative journalist, Hilde Lysiak, and is exec-produced by Jon M. Chu. Based on the real-life kid reporter of the same name, the series takes Hilde’s story into fictional territory by telling a tale of a young girl who moves from Brooklyn to a small lakeside town where she ends up unearthing a cold case that everyone in town, including her dad, has tried to bury. The real Lysiak, however, runs an online news operation, Orange Street News, which made headlines when the then 11-year old girl scooped local news outlets by being the first to expose a murder in her hometown of Selinsgrove, PA.
Steven Spielberg’s “Amazing Stories” has also now been given a premiere date of March 6. The rebooted anthology series is run by Eddy Kitsis and Adam Horowitz (“Lost”), and features episode directors Chris Long (“The Americans,” “The Mentalist”), Mark Mylod (“Succession,” “Game of Thrones”), Michael Dinner (“Unbelievable,” “Sneaky Pete”), Susanna Fogel (“Utopia,” “Play By Play”) and Sylvain White (“Stomp The Yard,” “The Rookie”).
Also previously announced, Apple set a premiere date for the new documentary series “Home,” which will air on April 17. The series offers viewers a look inside some of the world’s most innovative homes around the world.
Though only two months old, Apple TV+ has already landed its first Hollywood industry award, as “The Morning Show” star Jennifer Aniston snagged a SAG Award for best female actor in a drama. Co-star Billy Crudup also won a Critics’ Choice Award for best-supporting actor.
Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, today announced the launch of Anbox Cloud, a new platform that allows enterprises to run Android in the cloud.
On Anbox Cloud, Android becomes the guest operating system that runs containerized applications. This opens up a range of use cases, ranging from bespoke enterprise app to cloud gaming solutions.
The result is similar to what Google does with Android apps on Chrome OS, though the implementation is quite different and is based on the LXD container manager, as well as a number of Canonical projects like Juju and MAAS for provisioning the containers and automating the deployment. “LXD containers are lightweight, resulting in at least twice the container density compared to Android emulation in virtual machines – depending on streaming quality and/or workload complexity,” the company points out in its announcements.
Anbox itself, it’s worth noting, is an open-source project that came out of Canonical and the wider Ubuntu ecosystem. Launched by Canonical engineer Simon Fels in 2017, Anbox runs the full Android system in a container, which in turn allows you to run Android application on any Linux-based platform.
What’s the point of all of this? Canonical argues that it allows enterprises to offload mobile workloads to the cloud and then stream those applications to their employees’ mobile devices. But Canonical is also betting on 5G to enable more use cases, less because of the available bandwidth but more because of the low latencies it enables.
“Driven by emerging 5G networks and edge computing, millions of users will benefit from access to ultra-rich, on-demand Android applications on a platform of their choice,” said Stephan Fabel, Director of Product at Canonical, in today’s announcement. “Enterprises are now empowered to deliver high performance, high density computing to any device remotely, with reduced power consumption and in an economical manner.”
Outside of the enterprise, one of the use cases that Canonical seems to be focusing on is gaming and game streaming. A server in the cloud is generally more powerful than a smartphone, after all, though that gap is closing.
Canonical also cites app testing as another use case, given that the platform would allow developers to test apps on thousands of Android devices in parallel. Most developers, though, prefer to test their apps in real — not emulated — devices, given the fragmentation of the Android ecosystem.
Anbox Cloud can run in the public cloud, though Canonical is specifically partnering with edge computing specialist Packet to host it on the edge or on-premise. Silicon partners for the project are Ampere and Intel.
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The first is how it may impact Opera’s business moves in Africa. The company is engaged in competition with other startups across payments, ride-hail, and several other verticals in Nigeria and Kenya. Being accused of predatory lending, depending on where things go (or don’t) with the Hindenburg allegations, could put a dent in brand-equity.
