You've heard us talk before about SumUp, the handheld card reader that is popular across Europe with taxi drivers, food trucks and cafés, and was founded back in 2012 to leverage the growing power of smartphones.The business now has 4 million customers in 36 countries, and is exploring a listing in London or New York, believing the time is right for consolidation. According to the FT (which calls SumUp a UK fintech), it's aiming for a valuation of $15 billion. SumUp in fact came to life as a Berlin start-up aimed at taxi drivers, and was one of several European businesses including iZettle that came to market following the early success of Jack Dorsey's Square app and dongle. (One of its attractions is that users don't need a business bank account to take payments, hence its popularity with the self-employed.) It acquired its German rival Payleven in 2015. The FT reports that SumUp last year had a target of €160mn in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, a measure of profitability. Investors include Goldman Sachs and American Express but the four founders are expected to remain as the main shareholders. Commentators balked at Sumup looking for a valuation of 15 billion dollars on EBIDTA of €135mn in 2023, with PayPay for instance acquiring SumUp competitor Zettle for $2.2 billion. SumUp has no plans as yet to launch a stablecoin. (That last part is a joke: read on.)

Early Warning Systems, the company behind the bank-owned Zelle payments network, is thinking about launching a stablecoin. "Early Warning Services is a fintech company jointly owned and controlled by a group of major US banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Capital One, and PNC. EWS operates real-time payments network Zelle while offering financial institutions a range of payments compliance software and services," writes Yahoo Finance. "Launched in 2017 as the banking industry's answer to fintech platforms like Paypal, Venmo, and CashApp, Zelle processed over $1 trillion in payments volume last year and hit a new record last month, when users sent $108 billion across its network, according to the company." And there lies the rub: Zelle's competitors have launched or are considering stablecoins, which could speed settlement of Zelle payments, which currently rely on interbank clearing processes. Could it also enable Zelle to go international? The Clearing House is also exploring a stablecoin option.

Saudi Arabia's central bank signalled it is aligning with the growth of digital wallets, as Google Pay launches in the kingdom. But it also announced the launch next year of Alipay+ in line with its ambitions to be a major international finance centre serving east and west alike. The digital wallets will operate through the Saudi national payment system mada, and will force existing banks to up their mobile and digital game to compete for digital volumes through the big wallet players, and ensuring they are compatible with digital wallets. "These developments align with Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 objectives to bolster the digital economy, expand financial inclusion, and increase the share of cashless transactions to 70 percent by 2025," reports Arab News. "They also align well with SAMA's continued efforts to advance Saudi Arabia's digital payments landscape, supporting the goals of the Financial Sector Development Program -- one of the main components of Saudi Vision 2030." The announcements by SAMA, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, came during the Money2020 Middle East event in Riyadh.

PayPal, now a veteran in digital payments, says it is about to launch PayPal Links, a P2P service where users can request payments in one-time links that can be sent through any messaging platform. It will also enable P2P payments of crypto in the US including bitcoin, Ethereum and PayPal's own stablecoin PYUSD. It follows on PayPal's recent announcement of PayPalWorld, which should launch late in 2025 as a global payments platform that will allow users of domestic wallets to make cross border payments, which PayPal says is the first of its kind to connect national payment systems and digital wallets (though again, TerraPay may argue with that.) The first payment systems and digital wallets that will launch with PayPal World are Mercado Pago, India's NPCI International Payments Limited (UPI), Tenpay Global and Venmo.

The CEO of South Africa's branchless Discovery Bank told TechCentral that the bank's business is meeting its goals faster than it expected as it captures a demographic that "lives online" and would "never dream of walking into a branch". Discovery Bank, which has its origins in the Discovery insurance business, launched in 2019 as a "behavioural bank", and now has 1.3 million customers. Hylton Kallner said that data gathered through its app is allowing it to make very targeted offerings. "A lot of the products offered across the group are completely available in the banking app, including the behavioural rewards that that manifest for our clients, like if they are physically active and earn miles for achieving their weekly fitness goals," he said. "For sure, the data is just incredible. Motor insurance, for example, is interesting because we can make inferences based on how you how you spend in your bank account. We can measure how far you typically would be driving, when you are most likely to be driving, and so on. We have geolocated every single point-of-sale device in the country and through that data we are able to calculate key indicators and risk factors for motor insurance. The sophistication in our motor insurance product is such that we know which roads have more potholes than others and therefore have higher claims associated with them. So, all those things coalesce to allow us to offer clientKallner said that many of its services including its WhatsApp channel use artificial intelligence. Read the full interview here.

Separately, Bloomberg reports that MTN is making a major push into building AI data centres. Chief executive Ralph Mupita said in an interview the group is in talks with European and US firms to "build out facilities and sign up tenants to supply AI compute, then rent out capacity to other businesses and governments across the continent," says Bloomberg. "The group is also considering kitting out data centers with its own hardware. MTN has started building its first data center in Nigeria at an estimated cost of $240 million. There's now a push to boost capacity in other African countries. Microsoft and G42 announced a geothermal-powered data center in Kenya, while Indian telecommunications billionaire Sunil Mittal is planning additional AI capacity in Nigeria through Africa Airtel and Nxtra. Telecommunications companies globally are investing in data centers to help meet growing consumer and enterprise demand for AI, and to grab share of a new revenue stream from the hyperscalers. MTN said its AI data center business unit, called Genova, will form part of the group's overall strategy to monetize infrastructure, open up its platforms to third parties, and grow new revenue streams. Potential partners of the business would follow MTN, which operates across 16 markets in Africa, into markets where demand for AI is surging and the group has a presence, said Mupita."

The US central bank yesterday cut interest rates by a quarter of a point, the first cut since December 2024 and signalled two more cuts to come. "The quarter-point cut came against the backdrop of unprecedented pressure on the central bank from President Donald Trump, who has pushed for the Fed to lower the cost of borrowing and tried to oust a Fed governor to secure a panel of loyalists," reports Yahoo Finance. "Investors hope Wednesday's decision will bolster the cooling labour market and spur more growth, but tariffs and layoffs could complicate policymakers' path." US president Donald Trump has been pressuring the Federal Reserve for a cut. With inflation in the US still above 2 percent, the cuts suggest that the central bank is concerned about weakening growth and attendant growth in unemployment. The major US banks lowered their prime rates accordingly to 7.25 per cent.

Kenya's bank lending rose at the fastest pace in a year in July, spurred by the central bank cutting interest rates seven times in the space of 13 months. In an interview with NTV Kenya last week, Central Bank of Kenya Governor Kamau Thugge said bank lending to the private sector increased 3.3 per cent, which compares with a 3 per cent contraction in January and is the fastest growth since July 2024. "Kenya's banking sector delivered mixed results in the first half of 2025, with local lenders recording strong profit growth while foreign-owned banks struggled," reports Finance in Africa. "Among the eight major banks anaylsed, I&M Group Plc posted the highest jump in after-tax profit at 36 per cent, followed by Equity Group Holdings at 17 per cent and NCBA Group Plc at 12.6 per cent. Equity also reclaimed its title as the most profitable bank in East and Central Africa with net earnings of KSh 35 billion ($268 million). Other domestic lenders – Absa Bank Kenya Plc (9.1 per cent), Co-operative Bank of Kenya Limited (8.3 per cent), and Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB) Limited (8 per cent) – also delivered solid earnings." The rate cuts had been a point of contention between the central bank and commercial banks, with amendments to the Banking Act to impose penalties on banks that did not adjust rates accordingly. Kenya also has a wide range of digital credit providers competing hard with banks on the lending front.