ਸਤ ਸ੍ਰੀ ਅਕਾਲ,
Victoria from Techpoint here,
Here’s what I’ve got for you today:
- Interswitch enters banking tech race with Temenos deal
- Bolt Food enters grocery delivery in Kenya
- Orange launches new Mediterranean cable
Interswitch enters banking tech race with Temenos deal
Interswitch has just made a major move into Africa’s banking technology space. On June 4, 2026, the Nigerian fintech giant announced a partnership with global banking software company Temenos, a deal that signals a clear shift in strategy from payments-only infrastructure into full-scale banking technology services across the continent.
What the partnership really means is that Interswitch will now integrate Temenos’ core banking, digital banking, payments, wealth management, and financial crime systems into its offering. Instead of just processing transactions, Interswitch wants to help banks run their entire operations on its infrastructure, both cloud-hosted and on-premise. That puts it in a new category: a full banking technology provider, not just a payments company.
Why this matters is simple. African banks are under pressure. Many are still running on outdated systems that are expensive to upgrade and slow to modernise. At the same time, demand for digital banking is rising fast across markets like Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire. By combining Temenos’ global software with its own deep local footprint, Interswitch is trying to position itself as the bridge between legacy banking systems and modern digital-first finance.
The timing didn’t come out of nowhere. Interswitch, founded in 2002, has spent the last two decades building itself from a transaction-switching company into one of Africa’s biggest payments and digital commerce players. With products like Quickteller and Verve, it now works with over 300 financial institutions across more than 30 countries. Over the past few years, especially around 2024 and 2025, it has been steadily expanding beyond payments into broader infrastructure and enterprise services, setting the stage for a move like this.
Zooming out, this deal is part of a bigger scramble across Africa’s fintech ecosystem. Companies are now competing not just on payments but on who controls the “rails” of banking infrastructure itself. With the banking-as-a-service market in Africa and the Middle East expected to grow rapidly through 2026, Interswitch’s Temenos partnership signals a clear ambition: it doesn’t just want to power transactions anymore but the banks themselves.
Bolt Food enters grocery delivery in Kenya
Bolt Food is no longer just delivering lunch and dinner. Yesterday, the company announced a partnership with Quickmart Supermarkets that will allow customers in Kenya to order more than 12,000 products, from groceries and household essentials to beverages and wellness products, directly through the Bolt Food app. The service launches across more than 60 Quickmart stores nationwide, marking Bolt Food’s official entry into Kenya’s fast-growing on-demand retail market.
Victoria Fakiya – Senior Writer
Techpoint Digest
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What this means is that Bolt is trying to become an everyday commerce platform rather than a food-delivery app. Instead of opening Bolt Food only when they want pizza or burgers, customers can now use the same app to buy milk, detergent, vegetables, medicine cabinet essentials, and other household items. For Bolt, that’s a bigger opportunity because grocery and retail purchases happen more frequently than restaurant orders, creating more transactions and more work for its courier network.
The move also highlights how competitive Kenya’s delivery market has become. Food delivery platforms are increasingly looking beyond restaurants and into groceries, convenience retail, pharmacies, and other everyday purchases. Quickmart, which is celebrating 20 years in business, gains access to Bolt’s delivery infrastructure and digital customer base, while Bolt gains a trusted retail partner with a nationwide footprint. The partnership gives both companies a chance to capture a larger share of Kenya’s growing digital commerce market.
The expansion didn’t happen overnight. Bolt Food has spent the past several years building its delivery network across Kenya, expanding into new towns, adding merchants, and growing its courier fleet. Globally, Bolt has also been positioning Bolt Food, which exited the Nigerian and South African markets in 2023, as more than a restaurant-delivery service, working with supermarkets, florists, pet stores, and other retailers in multiple markets. The Quickmart deal is effectively the Kenyan version of a strategy the company has been testing elsewhere: use an existing delivery network to become a one-stop platform for everyday shopping.
The bigger picture is that Kenya’s digital economy is entering a new phase where delivery platforms are competing for a larger share of household spending. Ride-hailing companies became food-delivery companies. Food-delivery companies are now becoming retail marketplaces. As consumers grow more comfortable ordering everything from groceries to household supplies through apps, the battle is shifting from who delivers food fastest to who can become the default app for daily life. Bolt’s partnership with Quickmart is its latest attempt to secure that position before competitors do.
Orange launches new Mediterranean cable
A major piece of Internet infrastructure connecting North Africa and Europe is finally online. Orange this week announced that the ViaTunisia subsea cable, which links Marseille in France to Bizerte in Tunisia, has officially entered service. The 1,050-kilometre cable is the first active segment of the Medusa Submarine Cable System, a huge Mediterranean network that will eventually connect 17 landing stations across 12 countries.
While the new cable brings significant bandwidth capacity, its biggest advantage may be resilience. By creating an additional route between North Africa and Europe, ViaTunisia reduces reliance on existing cable paths and helps minimise the risk of large-scale disruptions caused by cable cuts, network failures, or natural disasters. The connection also plugs directly into Orange’s infrastructure in Marseille, one of the world’s most important connectivity hubs and home to 17 submarine cable landings.
For Tunisia, the benefits are immediate. A direct link to Marseille means lower latency, improved network reliability, and greater capacity to support growing demand for cloud services, AI applications, video streaming, and digital business services. Orange says each of its three fibre pairs on the system can carry up to 20 Tbps of traffic, giving operators substantial room to grow over the coming years.
The launch is also an important milestone for the wider Medusa project. Once fully completed, the 8,760-kilometre network will span both shores of the Mediterranean, connecting countries including Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. Designed with a total capacity of 480 terabits per second (tbps), the system is being built to support the explosive growth in global internet traffic expected throughout the next decade.
More broadly, the project highlights Orange’s growing ambitions across Africa. The company is already leading the separate Via Africa cable project linking Europe and South Africa while expanding its presence across the continent. Together, these investments point to a long-term strategy focused on building the digital infrastructure that will power Africa’s connectivity needs for decades to come. Rather than investing in isolated cable projects, Orange appears to be creating a continent-wide network designed to improve capacity, reliability, and access to global internet exchanges.
In case you missed it
- The Pope calls for AI that centres humanity, but the AI empire will crumble without exploitation
What I’m watching
- Your ancestors aren’t who you think they are | David Reich: Full Interview
- Which university degrees will survive AI job disruption? – Asia Specific podcast, BBC World Service
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Have a fun weekend!
Victoria Fakiya for Techpoint Africa
