👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – CBN cracks down on cheques

Good morning.

The African design market is ripe and ready for the picking, and Canva wants to get a head start by opening an office in Johannesburg. Does first-come, first-served apply here or will other design software come in guns blazing? 

Let’s keep watching. 

–

Zia.

Let’s get into it!

Nigeria’s Point of Sale (POS) agents have become the face of financial inclusion, but the House of Representatives is now sounding a loud alarm: the massive growth has been shadowed by a surge in fraud, and the entire digital-finance ecosystem is at risk.

The House Ad hoc Committee on Economic, Regulatory, and Security flagged major gaps, including unprofiled agents, cloned terminals, and weak Know Your Customer (KYC) practices that expose Nigerians to financial loss.

This goes beyond small-time theft: the Committee’s concerns point to systemic weaknesses with major implications for fintechs and national security. From unlicensed crypto operations that turn a basic payment service into an illicit finance channel to the data sovereignty risks major fintechs pose by storing sensitive data outside Nigeria’s territorial jurisdiction, POS agents now represent a significant risk to the Nigerian digital finance sector. 

What happens now? The ultimate goal of the House Committee is to recommend new legislation that delivers a harmonised regulatory framework to secure the digital ecosystem, protect consumers, and ensure that Nigeria’s huge fintech potential is responsibly secured and globally competitive.

Cheques might feel like a thing of the past, but they are quietly making their way back into Nigeria’s financial ecosystem, with the value of issued cheques hitting a staggering ₦5.15 trillion ($3.55 billion) in Q1 2025. This renewed usage, however, has brought a sharp rise in fraud, forcing the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to introduce a new rule.

The crackdown is severe: if you issue three cheques that bounce due to insufficient funds, you will face a five-year banking ban.

This is more than a slap on the wrist. Under the new rule, customers classified as “serial dud cheque issuers” will face a near-total financial lockout: they will lose access to the clearing system (the mechanism that allows banks to process cheques), denied all forms of bank credit—including loans and mortgages—for at least five years, and barred from opening any new current accounts for the duration of the ban.

Greater scrutiny: The CBN’s move is an attempt to enforce discipline and restore integrity and confidence in the payments system, which directly impacts the digital economy. The five-year ban is routed through the Credit Risk Management System and multiple credit bureaus, effectively blacklisting offenders across the financial sector. 

The rules also put banks on the hook: institutions that fail to report dud cheques or enforce the ban risk fines of up to ₦5 million ($3,439.17) per violation, with Executive Compliance Officers and Chief Technology Officers now personally liable for compliance failures. By tightening the screws here, the CBN is reminding everyone how seriously it wants to fight fraud. 

Vodacom, South Africa’s biggest telco, has signed a strategic collaboration with Google Cloud, tapping into Gemini, Veo, Imagen, and Google’s entire data stack to supercharge its digital transformation and sharpen its competitive edge across the continent. An interesting move for a group that recently revealed it’s eyeing a bigger stake in Safaricom. It shows how seriously Vodacom wants to shape the next phase of Africa’s digital economy.

The masterplan: Vodacom wants to pull together its massive data assets across markets, move them to Google’s data cloud, and build a single data layer that speeds up decisions and governance, and provides real-time insights. When this is done, Vodacom will layer generative AI across the business to boost network performance, improve fraud detection, and build new AI-powered services for millions of customers.

What’s Vodacom trying to do? Simply, it’s future-proofing itself. Vodacom is trying to evolve from just a connectivity company into a full-stack digital powerhouse that uses AI to run networks more cheaply and smartly. With a modernised backbone and Google’s AI stack, Vodacom aims to expand its presence in fintech and enterprise solutions. This partnership presents Vodacom with an opportunity to reinvent itself as Africa’s next major digital platform.

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Canva, the Australia-born design platform, is planting a deeper flag in Africa with a new regional office in Johannesburg’s Rosebank district. The launch is a signal that Canva wants to be closer and easily accessible to a market that produced over 77 million designs in one year alone.

Why should you care? For a tool so critical to working across different organisations, a physical presence that includes engineering and other kinds of on-the-ground support could be useful. It could mean better product localisation and a stronger feedback loop with the continent’s fast-growing creative economy.

Canva really wants Africa: The platform plans to roll out nearly 20 African languages, add Rand pricing (plus NGN, GHS, and KES), and deepen its presence in education by offering free access for students and universities. With Adobe tightening its pricing globally and Canva recently making Affinity completely free, the company is positioning itself as the more affordable and more Africa-ready creative suite. This new office launch signals that Canva wants to lock in loyalty before competitors do.

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