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Let’s dive in.

Mohammed Bashir Yunusa is a banking executive with over 15 years of experience driving growth, transformation, and value creation across the financial services industry. His expertise spans business strategy, digital banking, commerce, innovative finance, investment and deal structuring, corporate finance, and non-interest banking. 

As Divisional Head, Digital Banking & Commerce at The Alternative Bank, Yunusa provides strategic leadership for the Bank’s digital banking, commerce, product management, and ecosystem partnerships.

• Explain your job to a five-year-old.

I help people save, spend, borrow, and grow their money in smarter ways. 

My team builds the tools that make banking simple, fast, and useful, so people can focus on living their lives while money quietly works for them.

• Non-interest banking removes the tool most digital lenders build credit products around: interest. How do you build a credit-based commerce platform without it? 

You stop thinking about lending and start thinking about trade. 

In non-interest banking, every transaction must be backed by a genuine commercial activity that forces you to build around assets, partnerships, and real economic value, not risk-priced through interest. 

Our job isn’t to replicate conventional banking. It’s to build better commercial models where customers gain access to goods and services, merchants increase sales, and the bank earns from facilitating genuine trade. Done well, everyone wins. 

• In bank-fintech-merchant partnerships, who holds the leverage, and has that shifted in the last few years? 

Leverage belongs to whoever owns the customer relationship. 

A few years ago, fintechs had the advantage because they moved faster. Today, banks have become significantly more digital, merchants more sophisticated, and customers expect integrated experiences. 

The future belongs to partnerships where everyone contributes something unique—not to whoever tries to own everything. 

• What’s the strongest contrarian prediction you have about the future of digital banking in Nigeria?

The biggest banks of the next decade may not win because they have the most branches or even the most customers. They’ll win because they own the most valuable ecosystems. 

It isn’t about becoming the biggest bank. It’s about becoming the platform where customers build their financial lives.

There are risky bets, and then there is recognising a moonshot before the finish line comes into view. In hindsight, Moove’s rise looks obvious; five years ago, it was still a young African mobility startup trying to prove that fleet financing could scale across multiple markets. 

Silverbacks Holdings did not back Moove at the starting gun, but it came in early enough when the company’s global trajectory was still very much a question, not a certainty. That early conviction is now paying off in a very big way.

Silverbacks, the Africa-focused private investment and venture capital firm that also backed LemFi and OmniRetail, has now invested a total of $37 million in Moove, making it the biggest investment in the firm’s history. 

What happened? Silverbacks, which first joined Moove during its Series A round, has participated in the company’s$250 million Series C round announced on August 5, valuing the vehicle financing startup above $2 billion. The funding round was led by Mubadala and co-led by Toyota’s Woven Capital, with participation from Uber and BlackRock. Silverbacks’ high-conviction stake is nowworth over $62 million, according to the company.

Explain like I’m new here: Moove does not simply finance Uber drivers. It is building the infrastructure layer behind mobility platforms by financing, owning, and operating fleets across multiple markets. The company has also moved into the autonomous vehicle ecosystem through a partnership with Waymo in Phoenix, the United States, and London, UK, a remarkable leap for a startup founded in Nigeria in 2020. 

The maths of the momentum: Moove has reached an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $420 million and now operates about 42,000 vehicles across 29 cities in 13 countries. For Silverbacks, the numbers are equally striking: its fintech portfolio has generated an average cash-on-cash return of 15.8x, helped by successful exits such as Mono’s acquisition by Flutterwave.

Zoom out: Moove is becoming a strong example that an African startup can use the continent as a launchpad rather than a ceiling. Until more local institutional investors keep showing this level of conviction through multiple funding rounds, many of Africa’s biggest technology companies will continue to rely on global capital to power their largest growth phases.

Nairobi’s financial nerve centre is packing its bags and moving into a much shinier new home. The Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE), Kenya’s stock exchange, isrelocating its headquarters to the 17th floor of the Global Trade Centre (GTC) Office Tower in Westlands, according to local publication Kenyan Wall Street.

What happened? After decades at its iconic Exchange Building on Westlands Road, the NSE is preparing to move in January 2027. The bourse is seeking designers to fit out its new 11,863-square-foot space. The move is part of a broader property rationalisation strategy that will see the NSEsell its current headquarters to fund a modernised data centre and upgraded information and communication technology infrastructure.

Explain like I’m new here: The GTC is Nairobi’s version of a mini-Wall Street. It is a massive, mixed-use development that already houses global heavyweights like JPMorgan and the JW Marriott. By moving there, the NSE isn’t just getting better views; it is positioning itself at the heart of the city’s most prestigious commercial hub. It’s a signal that the bourse wants to look as sophisticated as theKES 4 trillion ($31 billion) market it oversees.

Why now? The timing suggests a bourse in transition. While the market has beenpowered to record highs by Safaricom and the big banks, the NSE’s physical infrastructure was starting to feel like a relic of a different era. Relocating to a Grade A tower allows the exchange to upgrade its technical backbone—essential for the high-speed, data-heavy trading it hopes to attract in its next phase of growth.

Zoom out: The relocation confirms a shift that has been years in the making: Westlands has officially dethroned the Central Business District (CBD) as Nairobi’s definitive financial nerve centre. Until the NSE completes its technical overhaul, the move remains a symbolic step toward a more modern, globalised market. In the race to be East Africa’s premier financial hub, the NSE has decided that first impressions and high-tech data centres really do matter.

Moove, a Nigerian-founded vehicle financing company, raised $250 million in a Series C funding round led by Woven Capital and Ion Pacific, with participation from BlueCrest Capital Management and Sona Capital. Aug 6)

Here are the other deals for the week:

• Moment, a South African fintech startup, raised $22 million in a Series A funding round led by AlphaCode Venture Partners, with participation from General Catalyst, MultiChoice, and French media group Canal+. (Aug 4)
• Yellow Card, a Pan-African stablecoin fintech startup, raised $40 million in a funding round led by SC Ventures by Standard Chartered, Sony Innovation Fund, Polychain Capital, Blockchain Capital, and additional strategic investors. (Aug 6)

That’s all for this week. Before you go,what does AI productivity mean for Africa? Find out here.

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