A holding company that builds, not one that allocates.

The constraint on African markets is not appetite. People want to move money, price risk, prove who they are and plan around what is coming. Demand for all four is already there, and has been for years. What is missing is infrastructure that makes those ordinary acts cheap enough to be worth doing.

A friction is the cost that sits in the way of an ordinary transaction. It is rarely one large obstacle. It is a fee, a queue, a form, a trip to a branch, a piece of information you cannot get and therefore guess at. Individually each is small. Together they are a tax on everyone in the market, paid quietly, by everyone, every day.

That tax is also the opportunity. A friction that persists is a description of a product that does not exist yet. We look for the ones that are structural. Those are the frictions that survive because nobody built the infrastructure to remove them, rather than the ones that survive because an incumbent happens to be slow. A slow incumbent gets faster. Absent infrastructure stays absent until someone builds it.

This is why the company operates rather than allocates. A holding company that only writes cheques has no view of how hard the last mile is, and the last mile is where African products fail: reconciliation against a mobile money provider, a failed callback, a customer whose number changed. We build so that we learn those things first-hand, and so that what we learn is reusable.

Kenya is the starting point for a specific reason. It has the most developed mobile money market on the continent and, as a result, the least forgiving one. Payment behaviour that would pass unnoticed elsewhere is visible here immediately. A product that clears that bar has already survived the demanding case, which is what makes the rest of the sequence credible.