👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Fynding a way to SA

When bank apps misbehave, they can quietly cripple payments in ways nobody enjoys. On Monday, that reality hit customers of Standard Bank, South Africa’s largest bank by assets, after an outage disrupted mobile and online banking, delayed transactions, and blocked new account openings.

The root cause was not a Standard Bank system failure, but a problem at Sage, the UK-based payroll, accounting, and business software provider whose platforms plug directly into bank data feeds. Sage confirmed it was experiencing a major outage in South Africa affecting its Business Cloud Accounting product and its connection to Standard Bank via Yodlee, the data-aggregation layer many fintechs rely on to pull bank information.

As a result, Standard Bank customers saw limited app functionality, slightly outdated balances, and missing features like transaction histories, airtime, and electricity purchases. New customer onboarding was also affected. Sage said its alternative Standard Bank connection was still working for some account types, but most users felt the impact. Customer reports spiked on Downdetector through the morning as payments slowed and access became patchy.

Outages like this are more than an inconvenience. When balances lag and transactions hang, customers start retrying payments, double-checking transfers, and calling support, increasing the risk of errors and reconciliation headaches across the system. In a market where digital banking is the primary rail for everyday commerce, small technical failures can ripple quickly.

Sage’s last update, posted at 11 a.m. UTC, said: “We are engaged with Standard Bank and our third-party provider, Yodlee, to resolve this issue for our customers as soon as possible.” But for Standard Bank and its customers, it was a bad day at the office.

Fynd, a Mumbai-headquartered AI-powered unified commerce platform backed by Reliance Retail Ventures, has launched in South Africa, signing the 29-year-old luxury fashion retailer with 94 boutiques across the country, Surtee Group, as its first strategic partner.

The timing makes sense: South Africa’s e-commerce market is pushing into a more mature phase, with online retail sales projected to hit nearly $7 billion in 2025, roughly 10% of total retail spend. The figure shows that the region presents a fertile ground for tech-enabled retail growth and makes it a strategic entry point into the continent.

So, what’s Fynd bringing to the table? Unification. Through its partnership with Surtee Group, the company is rolling out its full commerce stack, including digital storefronts, order management, warehouse management, and clienteling tools, to stitch together online and offline operations. The goal is real-time inventory visibility, ship-from-store fulfilment, faster order processing, and more personalised in-store engagement.

Fynd has been moving around: The move follows a steady global expansion by the company. Fynd entered the Middle East in September with a launch in the Gulf Cooperation Council and established a presence in Dubai, and then pushed into the UK in November through partnerships with Bridgehead and Incrementum, companies that help startups scale. The platform already supports more than 20,000 stores globally.

Zoom out: Fynd’s bigger play is infrastructure. As consumer expectations tilt toward seamless shopping, the company is betting that retailers need fewer and smarter tools that are stitched together properly to create a seamless customer experience.

The West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC) Group, a digital infrastructure provider managing over 100,000 km of submarine and terrestrial fibre optic networks across Africa, has secured R1.1 billion ($65 million) in debt financing to expand its connectivity and data centre footprint across the continent.

The funding was obtained through a sustainability-linked debt facility, meaning the loan is structured around performance targets tied to environmental and social goals, and is backed by development finance institutions, including the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Proparco, and the Emerging Africa & Asia Infrastructure Fund (EAAIF).

What is WIOCC up to? Simply put, the capital will be used for network expansion, infrastructure resilience, and open-access data centres. With this new fund, we can expect deeper investments, more fibre capacity, tighter fibre to data centre integration, and growth in high-demand markets across the continent from Wiocc

The raise builds on a series of recent moves. Through its data centre arm, Open Access Data Centres (OADC), WIOCC has committed about $240 million to expand its data centre in Lagos. In January, the group also signed a $10 million MoU with Nigeria’s Federal government aimed at extending broadband access to roughly three million homes. Since 2008, Wiocc has invested more than $750 million in digital infrastructure, terrestrial fibre, submarine cables, and carrier-neutral data centres across the continent.

Written by: Emmanuel Nwosu and Opeyemi Kareem

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu & Ganiu Oloruntade