Trust in Transition #26
Payments processing times
Welcome to the April 2026 edition of Trust in Transition. Trust in Transition is a monthly Substack published by the Trust Project at WiSER, bringing together research on finance, technology, and trust in Africa as it unfolds.
Inside This Edition
📆 The WiSER Desk
🌍 WiSER on the Move
⭐ The WiSER Feature: “Faster payments processing times is driving the adoption of digital finance amongst Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in Nigeria: Evidence from Yaba Commercial district Lagos.” Tunde Okunoye | Doctoral Fellow | Trust
✏️ Contributions:
In this edition, Wiser Trust scholars and affiliates engage with the following:
“Whether the Right to a Nationality Glass is Half-Full or Half-Empty, From the International HR Legal Perspective” Jonathan Klaaren | Professor | Law & Society
“Everybody Loves our Dollars” Laura Phillips | Senior Researcher | Trust
“An Election Season Without Surprise” Fatima Moolla | Doctoral Fellow | Trust
“We have a Buyer: DamangGold Mine transitions to Ghanaian Ownership” Caroline King | Doctoral Fellow | Trust
“Africa’s Battle for Digital Sovereignty” Hannah Krienke | Doctoral Fellow | Trust
“Understanding the powers and scope of Equity, the English law of trust and fiduciaries” Keith Breckenridge | Professor | Trust
This month’s edition examines how trust is made, negotiated, and sustained across Africa’s digital, financial, and political systems. The contributions follow how data, infrastructure, and institutions shape authority, value, and everyday life. Trust emerges here as something produced through the systems that organise how decisions are made, justified, and maintained.
📆 The WiSER Desk
The Trust Seminar
In April two trust seminars took place. Daniel Mwesigwa presented his paper, Risk, Data, Alignment: Making Credit Scoring Work in Kenya
Credit scoring is an increasingly central and contested domain of data and AI governance, frequently framed as a neutral and objective method of assessing risk across diverse economic and political contexts. Based on a nine-month ethnography of credit scoring practices in Nairobi, Kenya, we examined the sociotechnical and institutional work of data science in digital lending. While established regional telcos and banks are leveraging proprietary data to develop digital loan products, algorithmic credit scoring is being transformed by new actors, techniques, and shifting regulations. Our findings show how practitioners construct alternative data using technical and legal workarounds, formulate risk through multiple interpretations, and negotiate model performance via technical and political means. We argue that algorithmic credit scoring is accomplished through the ongoing work of alignment that stabilizes risk under conditions of persistent uncertainty, taking epistemic, modeling, and contextual forms. Extending work on alignment in HCI, we show how it operates as a two-way translation, where models are made “safe for worlds” while those worlds are reshaped to be “safe for models.”
Eddie Higgs presented his paper titled, Expressions and Emotion Detection from Reading Faces (Routledge, 2026)
‘Reading Faces’ examines the direct impact of past research on the development of AI systems; the way in which the past provides contexts which have predisposed people to accept outputs of AI systems as ‘common sense’; how the role of politics and the changing nature of the state have led to the introduction of AI systems and their precursors; how previous technologies led to the acceptance of the introduction of superficially similar AIs; and how the outputs – and biases, such as purported associations between race and criminality – of facial biometrics systems have been determined by the historical nature of the underlying datasets they analyze. Reading Faces approaches these issues within the sweep of Western History – how it has shaped conceptual categories about the application and ethics of AI, and tried to foist those ideas and values on the Global South. This chapter tells the story of the development of affect technologies, that purport to read emotions from facial expressions. The problematic nature of these technologies, especially in the absence of a consideration of the role of context, or intent, will be explored in terms of the theory of expressions as a means for souls to communicate with each other going back millennia but with important modification in Christian thought. Such beliefs can be seen in the foundational research underpinning modern affect AIs.
The next seminar, African Land buying Syndicates in early 20th century KZN, will be presented by Tara Weinberg on Monday the 4th of May.
WISER's TRUST seminar is hosted on-line every Monday afternoon at 16:00 - 17:00 SAST during the teaching semester.
WiSER on the Move🌍
Laura Phillips and Keith Breckenridge recently participated in a workshop hosted by WiSER and convened by Youssef Mnaili, titled “Agencies and Logics of Elimination in Global Settler Colonialisms.” The workshop brought together scholars examining how settler colonial regimes operate through a range of intermediaries and institutional actors, foregrounding the contingent and mediated nature of elimination across different global contexts.
This month doctoral research fellow Caroline King started her Writing Fellowship with the Centre de recherches internationales (CERI), at Sciences Po in Paris. In addition to focusing on writing up her PhD thesis, she will participate in seminars and lecture series, sharing her research with a wider Sciences Po audience.
Caroline will be presenting at the “Desirable Futures & Digital Technologies in Africa” Seminar Series, hosted by CERI and convened by Anna Katharina Osterlow and Michaël Bourdon. Alongside Corentin Cohen, Caroline will present work from her PhD, “Volatile Value Systems: Mobile Money in Ghana,” focusing on mobile money and fraud through an ethnographic lens that traces how trust is shaped across urban and rural contexts. The session will be followed by discussion led by Joël Ansah. It takes place on 7 May 2026, from 3–5pm (Paris time), with options to attend Online or in person at Sciences Po.
Doctoral research fellow Fatima Moolla attended the SA-UK Bilateral Chair in Political Theory Public Lecture Series, hosted by Professor Lawrence Hamilton, featuring a lecture by Dr Edward Murambwa (University of Cambridge) titled “The illusion of Precision: Targeted Sanctions and Authoritarian Resilience.”
The WiSER Feature 📝
Faster payments processing times is driving the adoption of digital finance amongst Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in Nigeria: Evidence from Yaba Commercial district Lagos.
Tunde Okunoye | Doctoral Fellow
Nigeria, with the largest population in Africa of 227 million people (World Bank, 2025), is one of the largest laboratories for financial inclusion in the world, attracting the attention of international development partners such as the World Bank, several new mobile finance start-ups, and sizable venture capital investment.
Today, there are over 217 financial technology firms in Nigeria, separate from the 26 traditional brick and mortar banks (Olujinmi, 2024; Statista, 2024), as government regulators race to meet the digital inclusion targets of the Central Bank of Nigeria. This is in an attempt to widen the percentage of the banked population beyond the current 45% (EFInA, 2021).
Digital finance companies who offer banking services on mobile devices dominate Nigeria’s fintech industry. These firms are characterized by the fact that they allow rapid access to account onboarding (usually within a few minutes) without a visit to a physical bank building. Indeed many of them do not have the branch network of traditional banks, except perhaps for a headquarters office.
This speed of facilitating financial inclusion, together with innovative services such as low service fees, and a more seamless technology experience, has endeared digital finance companies to millions of Nigerians. Their success is underlined by the fact that some of them have attained valuations higher than those of many traditional banks in Nigeria, despite their being technically labelled only as “microfinance banks” by the Central Bank of Nigeria regulations. An example of this success is Moniepoint, which achieved a $1bn valuation in 2024 after a Series C funding round led by the Development Partners International (DPI), Google’s Africa Investment Fund, Verod Capital, and Lightrock. (Namunwa, 2024).
A key driver for the financial inclusion success of digital finance companies is their technological edge. One aspect of this is their ability to implement faster payment processing times. The NIBSS Instant Payment (NIP) is Nigeria’s version of the global technology standard of Fast Payment System (FPS).
According to the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructure (CPMI), the FPS is defined as payments in which the transmission of the payment message and the availability of final funds to the payee occur in real time or near real time and on as near to a 24 hour and 7 day basis as possible (World Bank, 2021).
Yet, for financial settlements between traditional banks, a FPS can be delayed by up to 2 hours or more (PwC, 2025; HSBC UK, 2025). For busy shop owners in Lagos who want to immediately confirm that payments have been received into their accounts, and who do not want to keep their customers waiting, their solution has been to migrate from traditional banks to the new digital finance firms, where payments are received almost instantly. This is because these digital finance firms have been able to consistently implement the fast payment standard better than traditional banks. My interviews with traders and their customers in Yaba commercial district during my PhD research fieldwork suggests that this faster payment processing time is a key driver for the rapid adoption of digital finance (Yaba, 2024).
This technological advantage demonstrated in faster payment processing times by digital finance firms, according to a senior NIBSS official I interviewed, stems from the digital finance firms’ “internal procedures” (NIBSS Official, ‘Interview with NIBSS Official’, 22 May 2025). This might refer to the reality that Nigeria’s digital finance firms have founders who are often technologists first, then bankers second. Like Ekechi Nwokah, a PhD in Computer Engineering and the founder of Mines.io which has outsourced its technology to local and international mobile network operators, banks and other credit providers stated in an interview, “We have best in class technology because I spend the whole day thinking about technology. A traditional banker manager cannot do that. Even if they do that they still cannot beat our best in class technology” (Olowoporoku 2019).
References
Anane, I., & Nie, F. (2022). Determinants Factors of Digital Financial Services Adoption and Usage Level: Empirical Evidence from Ghana. International Journal of Management Technology, 26-47.
EFInA. (2021, June 3). EFInA Access to Financial Services in Nigeria 2020 Survey. Retrieved from EFInA: https://efina.org.ng/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/A2F-2020-Final-Report.pdf
HSBC UK. (2025). What is Faster Payments? Retrieved from HSBC UK: https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/what-is-faster-payments/
Kajol, K., Singh, R., & Paul, J. (2022). Adoption of digital financial transactions: A review of literature and future research agenda. Technological Forecasting and Social Change.
Lema, A. (2017). Factors influencing the adoption of mobile financial services in the unbanked population. Inkanyiso: Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Namunwa, K. (2024, October 29). Moniepoint Closes New Round Of Funding To Achieve Unicorn Status. Retrieved from CIO Africa: https://cioafrica.co/moniepoint-closes-new-round-of-funding-to-achieve-unicorn-status/
Nonvide, G., & Alinsato, A. (2023). Who uses mobile money, and what factors affect its adoption process? Evidence from smallholder households in Cote d’Ivoire. Journal of Financial Services Marketing, 117-127.
Olujinmi, D. (2024, May 15). These are the 10 largest banks in Nigeria – 2024. Retrieved from Nairametrics: https://nairametrics.com/2024/05/15/these-are-the-10-largest-banks-in-nigeria-2024/
PwC. (2025). PwC. Retrieved from Analysing faster payment systems (FPS): https://www.pwc.in/industries/financial-services/fintech/payments/analysing-faster-payment-systems.html
Statista. (2024, November 9). Number of fintech startups in Nigeria from 2017 to 2023. Retrieved from Statista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1252523/number-of-fintech-startups-in-nigeria/#:~:text=In%202023%2C%20there%20were%20217,of%20fintech%20startups%20in%20Africa.
Ukpabi, D., Karjaluoto, H., Olaleye, S., & Abass, M. (2018). Factors influencing mobile banking continuous use in Sub-Sahara Africa. In A. Shaikh, & H. Karjaluoto, Marketing and Mobile Financial Services (p. 24). London: Routledge.
World Bank. (2021). World Bank Fast Payment Toolkit: Nigeria Case Study. Washington DC: World Bank.
World Bank. (2025). Population, total - Nigeria. Retrieved from World Bank Group Data: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=NG
Yaba. (2024, April 1-30). Fieldwork Interviews in Lagos Nigeria. (B. Okunoye, Interviewer)
✏️ Contributions:
“Whether the Right to a Nationality Glass is Half-Full or Half-Empty, From the International HR Legal Perspective.”
Submitted by Jonathan Klaaren | Professor
Bronwen Manby’s recent article, ‘Filling the Holes in the Rights Framework: Statelessness, Racial Discrimination, Genuine Connections and the Right to a (Specific) Nationality’. International and Comparative Law Quarterly 75, no. 1 (2026): 37–63, argues that the right to a nationality is half-full rather than half-empty. She employs such a metaphor to encourage further progress towards the goal of reducing national states’ discretion on granting nationality. Manby is clearly frustrated with repeated invocations by national courts of the “prerogative” of “sovereign” states to grant nationality/citizenship; and thus surveys the several recent decades of international human rights jurisprudence in order to demonstrate that these gaps are being filled – and to make the point that such a recognition should encourage further gap-filling.
For those not following the twists and turns of the rulings of regional courts, including the recent 2025 European decision striking down Malta’s investment citizenship scheme, there are perhaps three big stories that Manby uses as background. The first is the reversal in trend - if not yet full turning on its head - of the venerable Nottebohm ‘genuine link’ requirement for nationality. Manby highlights “an alternative approach, reinterpreting the idea of a ‘genuine connection’ as a positive reason for the State to grant nationality, even without proof of statelessness; and the particular contribution of the African and Inter-American human rights institutions.” The second is nationality’s antithesis, statelessness, where Manby finds “an important shift in the approach in recent years”, following international UNHCR guidance “that the determination of a person’s statelessness must involve an assessment of the broader legal and policy environment of [the receiving] State.” Fascinatingly, Manby also weaves into her story the strategic litigation potential created by the obstructive use of thickets of practices, laws and policies by states to evade grants of nationality, drawing here on her own 2021work noting how formal naturalization is rare in all countries in the African continent as well as 2022work of Neha Jain on ‘Manufacturing Statelessness’.
“Everybody Loves our Dollars”
Submitted by Laura Phillips | Senior Researcher
Everybody Loves Our Dollars - How Money Laundering Won is a fascinating, if depressing book by Oliver Bullough, investigative journalist known for his work on the Caucuses and more recently, financial crime. Tracking global networks of money laundering - from South America, to Nigeria, to the Middle East - Bullough argues that the decades-long effort to curb financial crimes has been a spectacular failure. Regulatory bodies, most notably the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), come under particular critique. In a recently published Guardian Long Read adapted from the book, he suggests that the post-9/11 environment led to a rush of reforms that relied on stereotyping and prejudice to try lock down terrorist financing. The result, he suggests, is the cruel ‘debanking’ of Muslims across the world, often those trying to fund relief and charity work in deprived and war-torn communities. In short, international bodies have been remarkably active but in all the wrong ways. Another important insight in his book is the ongoing significance of cash. While cryptocurrency and other digital tools are fundamental to illicit financial flows, they have not displaced cash. High-denomination notes are particularly valuable to criminals, for whom $100 bills present easy laundering opportunities. Though the book has few recommendations or solutions, it is worth taking seriously, if only to help us develop a critique of the architecture that shapes the world we live in.
“An Election Season Without Surprise”
Submitted by Fatima Moolla | Doctoral Fellow
In April, three elections across the continent offered a snapshot of how power is currently organised and sustained. In Djibouti, Ismaïl Omar Guelleh secured a sixth term with 97 percent of the vote, extending a rule that began in 1999 and traces back to his uncle’s leadership after independence. In the Republic of Congo, Denis Sassou Nguesso was sworn in again after winning nearly 95 percent, continuing a political career that stretches back to 1979. And in Benin, Romuald Wadagni won with over 94 percent, a transition on paper but one closely managed within the existing governing elite. The margins are striking and familiar. What links these elections is less their outcomes than their structure: limited competition, weakened opposition, and results that carry little uncertainty. In April 2024, I wrote about leadership age — about how trust in stability, familiarity, and endurance shapes political authority. This moment points elsewhere. The question now sits with democracy itself. These elections show how continuity is actively produced through electoral processes that preserve the form of democratic participation while narrowing its substance. Power circulates within a defined space, sustained through repetition and overwhelming majorities that signal consensus while foreclosing contestation. These are landslide victories, and they are internationally recognised as such. That recognition matters. It stabilises outcomes, affirms legitimacy, and embeds these electoral patterns within the global democratic order. Elections continue to take place, and they continue to confer authority. In this context, trust shifts. It moves away from leaders alone and settles into the system that produces them, attaching to continuity and making repetition feel dependable, even as the scope for political change remains constrained.
“We have a Buyer: DamangGold Mine transitions to Ghanaian Ownership”
Submitted by Caroline King | Doctoral Fellow | Trust
As discussed in last month’s substack contribution, the lease for the Damang mine of Gold Fields mining company has not been renewed, with production being handed over by the Ghanaian government to Engineers and Planners Company Limited on 18 April 2026. At the end of March, the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources confirmed that only 100% Ghanaian owned companies would be allowed to throw their hat in the ring for a take-over of the Damang mine. Significant interest was shown by Engineers and Planners Company Limited, owned by Ibrahim Mahama, a Ghanaian billionaire, who has worked with the operations of the Damang mines as a contractor, giving the company ample insight into the operations before its confirmed take-over this month. The company has secured a financing package of $205 million jointly distributed by Stanbic Bank Ghana and Standard Bank South Africa, with the help of EcoBank and Absa Bank Ghana. Ibrahim Mahama himself noted that the acquisition of the mine had been in discussion for multiple years, and the smooth transition now is in part thanks to government involvement and facilitation of the negotiation process between E&P and Gold Fields. Although the mining grounds will require an overall investment of at least $1 billion, recent governing adjustments to the gold sector, and the soaring gold price have created a lucrative investment opportunity.
Ibrahim Mahama himself promised major infrastructural changes to the region, during his speech on Saturday. He spoke of building an airport that could offer a direct connection to Accra, as well as a paved road connecting Damang and Cape Coast. He highlighted that his words would be followed by action, also hoping to inspire Ghanaians to see the potential of their own country and its worthwhile investment opportunity.
“Africa’s Battle for Digital Sovereignty”
Submitted by Hannah Krienke | Doctoral Fellow | Trust
Digital sovereignty: Africa's new battle for independence
An article by Emmanuel Oduor on digital sovereignty raises important questions about Africa’s relationship with foreign technology and what rapid digitalisation really means for the continent’s sovereignty. While Africa is making tremendous strides towards digitalisation in identification and financial systems, hidden behind this expansion are growing concerns about who controls the data being produced.
The reality is that most of the infrastructure used across the continent is provided by foreign service providers. These providers play a key role in several institutions, from hospitals and government departments to financial institutions, and this leaves the most vulnerable to data breaches. Without local infrastructure or regulation, many African states remain beholden to foreign companies that control access as well as set service delivery prices. The article rightly points out that this is not just a tech problem; it is a sovereignty problem. Oduor notes that “when you don’t have the infrastructure, and you don’t have the regulation, you are 100% exposed”.
What makes this more urgent is that African states are beginning to understand the consequences firsthand. The recent refusals by both Zimbabwe and Zambia to accept American health aid, after they discovered the conditions on data access, signal something important. These are not just political decisions but rather reflect a growing awareness that dependency has a cost.
While tech innovator Strive Masiyiwa, through Cassava Technologies, is investing $720 million in a pan-African Sovereign AI Cloud, with five AI factories being built to reduce dependence on foreign infrastructure, this can be seen as a step in the right direction for African digitisation (Zimbabwe’s richest man plans to build five new AI factories across Africa | Business Insider Africa).
“Understanding the powers and scope of Equity, the English law of trust and fiduciaries”
Submitted by Keith Breckenridge | Professor
In our research over the last three years we have begun to argue that the enormous scholarly output on trust dating back to the 1970s fails to distinguish between trust and confidence. (This ambiguity was already clear in the English translation of Simmel’s use of “vertrauen” and several writers have commented on it.) Confidence is a product of experience and of capabilities, it cannot easily be produced, or restored once lost. Trust, as Maitland insisted a century ago, is the work of tightly regulated intermediaries – fiduciaries who defend the interests of beneficiaries above their own, and are subject to rigorous supervision, and effective remedies. Equity, the law of trusts and fiduciaries in many English-speaking countries, has done this work since the 17th century, but there are many similar fiduciary institutions: Delaware Chancery court, the legal institutions under waqf in Islamic countries after 800 AD, and the notarial institutions of civil law countries. The work that equity performs in corporate governance, in derivatives finance and mutual funds, and in off-shoring private wealth, has been well documented by Langbein and by Harrington but the practical reach and significance of equity for ordinary people in the English-law jurisdictions has been difficult to measure, despite the excellent legal history.
The recent decision by the UK Financial Conduct Authority to impose a £7.5 billion redress fine on the companies providing motor finance, provides an excellent example of the scale and potency of the law of equity. The decision affects South Africans (and their pension funds) directly because First Rand, parent of FNB and RMB, has had to make an R18 billion provision for the fine. In imposing the redress requirement the FCA was drawing on the arguments and recommendations of the August 2025 Supreme Court (SC) judgment. In that finding the apex court decision overturned some of the stunning implications of the Court of Appeal’s 2024 finding that used-car salesmen who provide credit are acting as fiduciaries and are thus subject, under equity, to protecting the interests of the beneficiary (the customer in this case) before their own self-interest. The SC case has put a stop to some of the equitable obligations, but the remedies remain within equity, and the tort of bribery (derived from, and unmistakably a product of equity as Rabinowitz KC argued) has survived, with potentially very disruptive effects on financing and many other commercial transactions.
Much has been made about the absurdity of holding used-car salesmen to be fiduciaries, but it was the implicit fiduciary obligations of credit provision that was clearly the problem for the Court of Appeal. Credit and fiduciary law have been woven together for centuries and
By contrast, the 2025 Supreme Court judgment insists that fiduciaries can only come into being explicitly (or by necessary implication, meaning that the work cannot be done otherwise) and that, while fiduciaries clearly create trust, they are not caused by it in isolation. As the court says, trusting an intermediary like your plumber (or your sommelier) does not make the plumber a fiduciary. The court also rejected the half-measure of a “disinterested duty” that some courts had been attributing to credit providers since 2007. Sweeping the fiduciaries out of vehicle sales allowed the court to deflect most of the equitable fiduciary obligations and remedies that had been applied to the salesmen by the Court of Appeal decision. But the equity story doesn’t end there.
Instead of invoking equity as a primary duty, the judgment turned to the obviously unfair elements (under the 2006 Consumer Credit Act) of the transaction with Johnson, including the very large commission that FirstRand paid to the salesman for arranging the financing, and the failure of proper disclosure and consent, to overturn the contract. For South Africans it’s interesting that the payment of the commission was explained in the fine-print of the contract, but the court rejected the idea (without controversy) that this implied meaningful consent.
And here, equity comes back in. The compensation recommended by the court — the amount that FirstRand paid in commission plus interest — is clearly equitable restitution without any of the common law requirements to prove harm. Similarly, and relatedly, the whole regulatory posture of the FCA (and its choice of remedies) are derived from the same equitable tradition.
In some ways equity remains more potent in this context after the SC decision, especially for those who are acting as fiduciaries. Despite the efforts of the South African silk, Laurie Rabinowitz, the tort of bribery survived unscathed — and it remains, because of long-established practice, subject to the special equitable remedies of rescission, secret profits, and restitution. The tort can only be applied to an explicit or necessary fiduciary, and it must include payment of an incentive to a broker and a lack of fully informed consent. But because these requirements are retrospective, there are likely to be many challenges to existing agreements. Millions of people, as Rabinowitz argues in this interesting presentation, may now claim reimbursement for hidden commission payments.
Trust in Transition is a Substack, by the Trust Project, exploring the intricate interplay between trust, finance, and societal evolution within the African context. This space serves as a lens into the fascinating dynamics of trust infrastructures, financial landscapes, and their transformative impact on Africa's economic pathways.