TechCabal – C-Reddit 💰

THE DAY IN REVIEW

The company confidentially submitted a draft registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 

Reddit raised a whopping $410 million in financing in August in a Series F funding round led by Fidelity Investments, valuing it at $10 billion and bringing their total funding amount to $1.3 billion. With 50 million visitors per day, there has always been buzz about the company’s plans, especially as the subreddit forum, r/WallstreetBets, played a massive role this year in shifting the market for Gamestop and AMC. In August, CEO Steve Huffman mentioned plans of going public. “We’re still planning on going public, but we don’t have a firm timeline there yet,” he said in a statement to the New York Times.

The price range and amount of shares to be offered to the public is yet to be determined and SEC still has to complete its review process, but it looks like 2022 will be starting with a bang for this company.

2. GHANA’S E-LEVY BILL MOVES FORWARD

Ghana’s e-levy bill has now been brought to the floor of the country’s parliament and deliberations by its finance committee have begun. As we reported, Ghana is trying to impose an e-levy charge of 1.75% on all electronic transactions above GH¢100 ($16), from February 2022. 

Ghana has the third-largest mobile money market, with a transaction value of $68 billion in 2020, and its government wants a cut of that. The bill is facing serious opposition from the public and the National Democratic Congress who are afraid that the already hard conditions of living in Ghana are going to get harder with this bill. 

The one bright spot in all this is that, according to the Minister for Information, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, the government is in talks with telecommunications companies to reduce their own charges on electronic transactions. In a statement to Joy News, the minister said, “Hypothetically, if the telcos reduce [their charge] by, say, 0.25%, and the government still stays at 1.75%, the net effect is 3.5% as against what would have been 3.75% initially.”

An even better idea, according to Ghanaians on Twitter, would be to leave the telcos alone and impose no levy, but we’ll see what the finance committee decides.

TECHCABAL’S HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

Yes, yes, we know Christmas is less than a week away, and this is a bit late, but everybody knows that the big boys are always too busy to shop before the holidays. So, if you want to ball like the big boys, here’s a last-minute gift guide for all our overworked hard-working readers out there.

1. MUSIC STREAMING SUBSCRIPTIONS

African music has had a great year. It’s been great the last couple of years and has only gotten better with time. You can stream and download all your favourite songs on Apple Music, YouTube Music or Spotify. Gift someone, or even yourself, a music subscription this season, so that next year you too can post your #SpotifyWrapped, and we can all judge your bad taste in music.

2. VIDEO STREAMING SUBSCRIPTIONS

With multiple plans to choose from, Iroko TV and Netflix have been giving us really amazing African content in the past few years. Get a Nollywood lover an Iroko or Netflix subscription today.

3. WIRELESS HEADPHONES

You know who everybody loves: the person who buys whole-package gifts. Don’t just gift a music subscription, get listening devices to go with it. There are a plethora of wireless headphones to choose from, like the Oraimo FreePods 3, which are waterproof, affordable and have 8+ hours of battery life.

4. A FAN FOR THE HARMATTAN

If you love somebody, get them a rechargeable fan for this season. Harmattan has arrived in West Africa, and if you live there, like some of us, you know how it gets: it goes from windy and cold in the morning to dry and hotter-than-hell at noon. We’d suggest an AC, but unless you’re going full package and also paying your gift victim’s electricity bill, please stick to rechargeable fans.

5. LED STRIP LIGHTS

The holidays are often full of cheer, but they can also bring up a lot of feelings and memories that are not so great. 🙁 Simple things like lighting affect our brains and serotonin production, and a change of light and colour can elevate a person’s mood. Between seasonal depression and the pandemic, somebody you know could use some cheering up this season. Give the gift of a lifted mood this season by buying someone or yourself multi-coloured LED strip lights.

TC INSIGHTS: INSUFFICIENT FUNDS

Nigeria is a country of contradictions. The super-rich live two steps away from those below the poverty line. 

Even though Nigerian fintech startups are receiving millions of dollars in funding and the country boasts a booming e-commerce and payments industry, more than half of the country doesn’t have a bank account. The 2017 Global Financial Inclusion Database showed that only 39.7% of adult Nigerians have an account at a bank or financial institution. 

While this is a bit ironic, it’s not surprising. 33.3% of Nigerians are unemployed and many of those who work are paid irregularly or in cash. They don’t have enough money to keep in the bank or anywhere else.

According to a report by EFInA, 3 out of 5 Nigerians say they don’t own a bank account because of insufficient funds. Some believe that banks are too far away. Nigeria has 4 bank branches and 17 ATMs per 100,000 adults, much lower than countries with high financial inclusion numbers. 

There’s also the issue of identity. To open a bank account in Nigeria, a user would need to provide, at minimum, a government-issued ID card and proof of address—documentation that 73% of those without a bank account did not have.

A good number of the unbanked population don’t see any real need to get a bank account. For 15% of this group, a family member already had an account. 14% preferred using cash.

Over the last few years, Nigerian banks have begun to adjust to the needs of the unbanked population by, for instance, doing away with the minimum opening balance.

Still, the main barriers to financial inclusion—institutional exclusion, affordability, access, and low awareness—remain. Less traditional services like mobile money are quickly becoming the answer, as they circumvent some of the barriers to financial inclusion. Mobile money operators (MMOs) are more accessible, employing more than 260,000 mobile money agents across the country. It is no surprise that the number of mobile money users almost tripled from 2016 to 2019, and their number of transactions increased eightfold in that same time. 

Although unconventional, mobile money operators seem better structured to fill the gap and serve the neglected unbanked population. 

You can download all our reports here and watch videos from our events. Send your custom research requests here.

*Thank you for reading our data stories all through 2021. This is the final one for the year. Our next story will be published on January 10, 2022. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all our readers. See you next year. – Olanrewaju Odunowo, Head of TC Insights

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