Safaricom cleans house

Safaricom fired 118 employees for fraud in the year to March, roughly one every three days. It is the fourth year in a row that the number has risen at Kenya’s largest telecom company and M-PESA’s operator.

What happened? Dismissals jumped from 113 in the previous year. Safaricom also issued three disciplinary warnings and referred 14 cases to law enforcement. The misconduct included theft, falsifying company records, and unauthorised access to customer call records.

Safaricom separately recovered KES 953 million ($7.4 million) in inflated commissions paid to agents after its monitoring systems flagged irregular payments. The company has not linked those recoveries directly to the 118 employees who were fired.

Explain like I’m new here: Fraud is particularly sensitive at Safaricom because the company sits on much more than phone records. M-Pesa processed KES 41.68 trillion ($323 billion) across 46.4 billion transactions in the year to March. Employees, dealers and agents can therefore access customer identities, SIM registrations and a payments network used by tens of millions of people.

Safaricom has dealt with insider fraud for years, including unauthorised system access, fraudulent SIM swaps and misuse of M-PESA processes. It has steadily added automated monitoring and machine-learning tools to catch suspicious activity.

Between the lines: More dismissals do not automatically mean fraud is getting worse. Safaricom has expanded the operations its fraud reporting covered in recent years, while better analytics can uncover misconduct that previously went unnoticed.

A more useful measure is whether actual losses and successful attacks fall. Safaricom says its new SIM-swap system, which runs 18 automated checks before a line can be replaced, has already cut fraudulent swaps by 65%.

What to watch: Safaricom is increasingly taking sensitive decisions away from individual employees and agents and putting them into automated systems. If those controls work, future fraud reports should eventually show more than people getting caught. They should show fewer successful fraud attempts in the first place.

On October 19, Moniepoint, a Nigerian fintech unicorn, informed employees of an internal restructuring affecting roles across backend, frontend, mobile, quality assurance, and product management. The company says some positions will become redundant as it moves to smaller teams that own products from start to finish. Moniepoint has offered affected employees five months’ salary to leave voluntarily, while saying it will first look for suitable roles elsewhere in the business. The company has not disclosed how many employees will be affected.

Explain like I'm new here: Moniepoint became a unicorn in 2024 after raising $110 million, bought a 78% stake in Kenya’s Sumac Microfinance Bank in March, and says its subsidiaries now process more than $400 billion in annual digital payments. In October, one employee said the company hired more than 120 people, while Moniepoint has previously said it was struggling to fill hundreds of senior technical roles. However, in August, Moniepoint phased out MonieWorld, its UK-Nigeria remittance product, less than 18 months after launch.

Why the restructuring? The fintech says the restructuring is part of a regular strategic review as the business moves into its next growth stage. It is moving to a platform-group model, where smaller teams own specific product areas, and it is also creating platform architect roles to oversee the shared technology underneath those teams. The restructuring and growth reflect a company still expanding, but becoming more selective about where it puts people and money.

The bigger picture: Moniepoint is also joining a tech-industry shift towards smaller teams. Block, the parent company of Square and Cash App, cut about 40% of its workforce earlier this year, citing AI and a leaner organisational structure. Jumia and Zap Africa have also tied workforce changes to efficiency and AI. Moniepoint says AI is not the reason for this restructuring, although the company has discussed internally how AI could streamline product-management work.

Stablecoins are having their moment in African payments, and Circle, the company behind USDC, is backing the infrastructure that wants to make them actually useful.

What happened? CrissCross, a South African cross-border payments company, has received an undisclosed investment from Circle Ventures, Circle’s corporate venture arm. The investment was made through CrissCross’s parent company, Stitch Group. The money will help CrissCross expand its payment connections and liquidity across Africa, while building out stablecoin settlement for enterprise customers.

Explain like I’m new here: Stablecoins such as USDC are digital tokens designed to maintain a stable value against a currency, usually the US dollar. That makes them useful for moving dollar value between markets. African fintechs are beginning to build around this idea.

Flutterwave announced a Circle Ventures investment in July and added USDC settlement to its payments platform. Onafriq has also been working with Circle on regulated stablecoin settlement across its network of more than 40 African markets. CrissCross partnered with Velocity in October to connect institutional stablecoin liquidity to local collections and FX across more than 30 African markets.

Why Circle is interested: Every new payment platform that builds USDC into its infrastructure potentially creates another route for the stablecoin to move through the financial system. Sub-Saharan Africa also received more than $205 billion in on-chain crypto value between July 2024 and June 2025.

CrissCross says it operates across more than 30 markets and supports more than 20 currencies. The investment should help it deepen those local connections and give enterprises more ways to move between stablecoins and local currencies.

CRYPTO TRACKER

The World Wide Web3

Source:

Coin Name	Current Value	Day	Month
Bitcoin	$79,869	- 0.30%	- 5.46%
Ether	$2,390	- 2.19%	- 14.03%
XRP	$1.31	- 2.20%	- 19.85%
Solana	$103.84	- 1.51%	- 13.17%

* Data as of 06.49 AM WAT, October 28, 2026.

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