Digital Banking Expansion and Infrastructure Risks in Global Finance

GoTyme Bank moves from corner store to mall

Going upmarket? After a seven-year itch, TymeBank is concluding its partnership with Pick’n’Pay Stores and moving instead to partner with shopping malls. TymeBank initially picked the grocery store as a partner for its kiosks, soon after adding ambassadors to help with opening accounts. The shift to malls will start this month, and comes alongside a re-brand from TymeBank to GoTyme Bank, reflecting its international status. “Shoppers also earned Smart Shopper points for transactions made with a GoTyme Bank card,” reports TechCabal. “Now, that chapter is closing.” But why? “TymeBank says times, seasons, and banking behaviour have changed. When TymeBank officially launched as a digital bank in 2019, physical kiosks inside grocery stores made sense because foot traffic was guaranteed and digital trust was still growing.

Seven years later, customers are banking digitally, and people do not want banking customer support on the grocery aisle. Plus, the bank just launched a new digital banking app in February 2026. TymeBank will now use malls in South Africa as dedicated physical centres to issue debit cards and offer customer support, while enabling users to still access cash deposits and withdrawals at Pick n Pay stores.” Capitec had started with small branches close to taxi ranks and other high-footfall areas and later moved upmarket into malls. Unlike most South African banks, it is continuing to grow its branch network, and confirmed it will continue to do so through 2026.

Data centres become a new infrastructure target in wartime

Big tech companies have poured vast investment in building data centre infrastructure in recent years, along with the cables connecting them together. But this weekend marked the first time that a data centre was knocked offline in a military conflict. It’s not clear if the data centres were deliberately targeted: there’s an old expression that the first casualty of war is truth. Amazon said that one of its data centres in the UAE had been ‘impacted by objects’.

The objects arrived, presumably from the sky, on a day when Iran launched a barrage of attacks on neighbouring gulf countries, suggesting damage from a drone or perhaps debris from an intercepted missile. The impacts caused a fire at the UAE data centre, and financial institutions told Reuters that damage knocked banking services offline. The UAE has become a major destination for data centres, after the US last year approved the regular export of powerful chips, and a tour of the region by US president Donald Trump last May promised to turn the region into a third AI superpower after the US and China.

Underwater cables between European countries have been severed in recent years by civilian vessels thought to be working as Russian proxies though Russia has denied responsibility. Cable damage in the Red Sea in 2023 and last year was attributed to Houthi attacks on vessels that then dragged their anchors, severing cables – and accidental damage of cables is still the number one reasons for damage globally. “In previous conflicts, regional adversaries such as Iran and its proxies targeted pipelines, refineries, and oil fields in Gulf partner states. In the compute era, these actors could also target data centers, energy infrastructure supporting compute, and fibre chokepoints," Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies said last week. Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank said yesterday its platforms and mobile apps were unavailable due to an IT disruption though it did not specify the exact cause. “A strike, if confirmed, on the AWS facility in the UAE will mark the first time a major U.S. tech company's data center has been knocked offline by military action,” Reuters added. “It could also raise questions around Big Tech's pace of expansion in the region.” There were separate reports of power and connectivity problems at a data centre in Bahrain. (Update: it now appears that two of Amazon’s data centres in the UAE were hit.)

The digital banking road to profitability

Ridehailing service Grab will make a big push into AI and financial services in the coming years as it turns profitable, its president and COO Alex Hungate told Reuters. “Grab has set goals for the next three years of growing revenue by more than 20% each year and tripling EBITDA to $1.5 billion in 2028 from last year's level, President and Chief Operating Officer Alex Hungate said in an interview at the company's Singapore headquarters. The company, which operates in more than 900 cities across Southeast Asia, is also expanding its financial services offerings, and can use its data to underwrite loans more precisely than traditional banks typically can, according to Hungate.

Grab has taken ‘toeholds’ outside Southeast Asia, including its acquisition in U.S. wealth platform Stash, he added. Hungate said Grab's ‘first and best’ use of cash is reinvesting in Southeast Asia to drive organic growth, although the company is open to select acquisitions. Nasdaq-listed Grab earlier this month announced its first-ever full-year net profit with its 2025 results, 14 years after it was founded and following billions of dollars in fundraising. However, the company's forecasts for 2026 revenue and adjusted EBITDA fell short of Wall Street estimates, sending shares lower. The stock is down more than 15% this year, while Uber is down 11% and Lyft is down 31%.”

Grab formed an alliance with Singtel in 2019 to apply for a digital banking licence and now has operations in Singapore and Malaysia, but it cut 10 per cent of the workforce in 2025 as it looks to find profitable growth. Cuts in central bank interest rates across the region are making it harder for banks to generate net interest income. Anosh Pardiwalla, head of Indonesia at consulting firm Oliver Wyman, noted: “The issue for a number of digital banks is that avenues to grow non-interest income are not a lot beyond smaller-ticket insurance and other related cross-sells.”

Get a loan: buy a bedroom

Finding it hard to get a mortgage for a house or apartment? A Spanish company is pioneering the sale of bedrooms, as housing affordability has become one of the top challenges for people living in European cities. “In Spain, where housing shortages in Madrid, Barcelona and other major cities were made worse by a surge in short-term holiday rentals, Habitacion.com offers individual rooms for up to 80,000 euros ($95,200), about a third of what a one-bedroom flat would fetch in similar locations,” reports Reuters. “It said it sold 200 rooms last year and has a waiting list of 32,000, with properties in seven cities listed on its website.” Typically, banks won’t offer mortgages for these shared properties, as they want collateral on the whole property, and co-ownership introduces all kinds of complications.

“Founder and CEO Oriol Valls says his firm offers a solution to the squeeze on finances – official data show average Spanish monthly salaries rose 26% over the past decade and property prices 81% – and changing life circumstances. ‘People no longer get married, or if they do, they get married but don't have children ... or they do it much later,’ he said. ‘They require much smaller living spaces that are also much more affordable’. Alvarez, a prospective buyer who declined to give his first name, said Habitacion.com offered to help him get a personal 10-year loan from a regional bank at 6% interest, twice the regular mortgage average, but in the end could not find any rooms in Madrid where he lives.”