👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – ‘Pay taxes, dead man’

If the living complain about taxes, who then will tell the “dead” to cry foul? Nobody. So, they have to take the barrage as it comes.

This is the case of Sendy, the Kenyan parcel delivery startup, which became insolvent in 2023. Despite being inactive for two years, a Kenyan High Court ruled that the startup owes up to $635,000 in backdated value-added taxes (VATs) and must pay.

How did Sendy end up with such debt? The court found that Sendy operated not only as a digital intermediary, but also as a service provider that controlled key aspects of its delivery process. The court said Sendy received payments in its own name and set the terms of service, which made it liable for VAT on the entire transaction amount.

Between the lines: The decision overturned an earlier tribunal ruling and could expose other platform companies like Uber, Bolt, Glovo, Little Cab, and Jumia to similar treatment. Kenya’s growing appetite for taxing the digital economy is now testing how far regulators can go in treating tech platforms as full-fledged service providers rather than neutral intermediaries.

With the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA), the country’s taxman, tightening its interpretation of VATs, platforms that manage transactions, customer data, and logistics could soon face the same scrutiny as Sendy, forcing global firms to either comply or retreat.

Zoom out: The big question now is whether the KRA can actually collect the taxes from Sendy, with the startup already in administration. Any attempt at recovery may depend on unsold assets or proceeds from its technology sales—if it still has cash left. It leaves a poser: who foots the $635,000 tax gap? Sendy’s administrators, investors, co-founders, or what’s left of the brand?

A merger here, an acquisition there, and Africa is knee-deep in a busy banking season. We’re not sure if the recapitalisation exercises going on in several markets are opening up these opportunities, or if Q4 is just hunting season for these money-spinners.

Standard Chartered Uganda, the subsidiary of the UK banking conglomerate, has sold its wealth and retail banking (WRB) business to Absa Bank Uganda, the subsidiary of South Africa’s third-largest bank. If you’re wondering, that’s the division handling customer-facing services such as personal accounts, loans, and SME banking.

Between the lines: Following its 2024 announcement, Standard Chartered wants to focus on serving corporate clients—large corporations, development, organisations, governments, banks, and cross-border trade investors—in Uganda, keeping its corporate and investment banking business across key markets where it is seeing stronger returns. 

This doesn’t mark an exit for the bank. Standard Chartered is staying put in Uganda, but the lender is also expected to sell its wealth and retail banking businesses in Zambia and Botswana.

Why is Standard Chartered trimming its WRB businesses in Africa? Globally, the bank’s Wealth and Retail Banking (WRB) segment generated $7.8 billion in operating income in 2024, compared with $11.8 billion from Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB), according to its annual report. Africa’s retail operations contributed only a fraction of that total, making the refocus on corporate clients a straightforward profitability call.

Zoom out: Beyond profitability, Standard Chartered has not given a deeper reason for trimming its businesses. Yet, for a continent where financial inclusion for consumers has been a headline topic, it seems businesses are the bigger fish in the pond. Standard Chartered and Absa will finalise the deal to ensure a smooth transition.

If you use M-Tiba, the Safaricom-backed digital health wallet, you may need to take a seat for this one.

M-Tiba, the wallet used by millions of Kenyans to save and pay for healthcare, is at the centre of what could be one of the country’s biggest medical data breaches yet. 

Catch up: Kazu, a self-described hacker group, says it accessed M-Tiba’s servers and walked away with more than 17 million files, about 2.15 terabytes of data. The group even released a 2GB sample online to prove they were not bluffing. The sample alone contained information for about 114,000 people across clinics and pharmacies. Kazu is suggesting the real number could be in the millions.

It gets worse: Inside that sample were patient names, national IDs, phone contacts, dates of birth, and in some cases, medical diagnoses and billing details—the kind of information meant to be locked in a digital dungeon with three padlocks and one bouncer.

What does Kazu want with medical records? Extortion. When customer records are stolen, it is typically to enable the malicious group to extort the company involved. But CarePay is not having it.

Sherlock Holmes CarePay: M-Tiba’s operator, Kenyan healthtech CarePay, hasn’t confirmed the leak but has requested copies of the alleged files to verify what’s circulating. The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC) is aware of the situation but is staying quiet while the case is active.

Zoom out: The incident points to the fragility of Kenya’s cyber defences despite its rapid digitisation.

Airtel Money, the mobile money service of Airtel Africa, is growing rapidly. The total value of transactions passing through its platform has risen to over $193 billion a year, with its customer base expanding to nearly 50 million people across 14 African countries. This strong growth is driving the company’s plan to become a publicly listed company in 2026.

Does this mean a new fintech giant in Africa? This growth means Airtel Money is now one of the top three mobile money providers in Africa, alongside giants like M-Pesa and MTN Mobile Money. It has become a major competitor, especially in countries like Kenya, where it has rapidly gained market share. 

The success is driven by signing up hundreds of thousands of new agents and more customers using smartphones, meaning more and larger transactions. Airtel Money is no longer just a side business for a telecom company; it has become a powerful fintech leader in its own right.

What next? The big next step is an Initial Public Offering (IPO), where Airtel Money will sell its shares to the public for the first time. This is planned for H1 2026. This move could value Airtel Africa at over $4 billion, making it one of the biggest fintech stock market listings ever in Africa—if it’s listed on an African bourse. The money raised will be used to expand its services further into areas like digital banking and lending, to compete even more strongly across the continent.

Source:

* Data as of 06.35 AM WAT, October 29, 2025.

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Written by: Opeyemi Kareem, Emmanuel Nwosu, and Zia

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu & Ganiu Oloruntade

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