Technology
AppZone Wins Excellence in Blockchain Technology Award
By Adedapo Adesanya
Sub-Saharan Africa’s payment infrastructure company, AppZone, has been announced the winner of the Excellence in Blockchain Technology Award at the 2022 edition of the Africa Fintech Summit, recently held in Washington DC.
Now in its 7th year, the Africa Fintech Summit brings the entrepreneurs and opportunities revolutionizing finance in Africa to the world’s stage, through a series of pan-African summits, roundtables, virtual events, and investor missions.
The Africa Fintech Summit Awards platform is a longstanding tradition designed to recognize African fintech stakeholders for their actions in enabling the continent’s start-up ecosystem, accelerating innovation, and driving financial inclusion and literacy.
AppZone was chosen for this award in recognition of its efforts in leading the adoption of blockchain technology for payment processing on the continent and achieving interoperability with the infrastructure of existing traditional financial ecosystem stakeholders on its blockchain payment network, ZONE.
The initiative is Africa’s first private blockchain network that connects Banks and fintechs together without any intermediary to enable frictionless digital payments while empowering previously excluded financial institutions to participate.
It has been adopted by over 16 commercial banks in Nigeria and is expanding to other financial institutions, fintechs, and commercial banks across Africa.
Speaking on the company’s recognition, co-founder and CEO, Mr Obi Emetarom, expressed his delight about the organisation’s emergence amongst so many other well-deserving companies creating value in the ecosystem.
“The increasing maturity of the fintech ecosystem in Africa is impressive, and we are happy to be a part of the story of progress for the continent. Whether as an entrepreneur, investor, traditional financial institution, or customer, it is an exciting time to be involved in African Fintech. Even more rewarding is the joy of getting recognition for the solutions we create at AppZone.
“We remain committed to our mission of connecting every financial store of value in Africa to the rest of the world. Recognitions like this will only spur us on to give more to Africa’s fast-evolving Fintech landscape,” Mr Obi said.
Every year since its inception, the Africa Fintech Summit brings together the most active and influential minds driving the growth of Africa’s fintech sector while recognizing excellence in entrepreneurship and innovation across the Fintech ecosystem in Africa.
Awardees at the Africa Fintech Summit 2022 were selected with a hybrid approach of leveraging public nominations and feedback from the AFTS Advisory Board.
Through its Layer-1 Blockchain network, Appzone digitizes fiat payments and enables the transition to digital currencies while connecting previously excluded financial institutions into an all-inclusive payment ecosystem.
In December of 2021, Appzone launched Zone, Africa’s first decentralized payment network, which allows participating institutions to connect directly with each other and perform payment transactions without an intermediary while completely automating settlement, reconciliation, and dispute management.
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
One of the players in the Nigerian gaming industry, Secure Electronic Technology (SET) Plc, has appointed Ms Leticia Otomewo as its acting secretary.
This followed the expiration of the company’s service contract with the former occupier of the seat, Ms Irene Attoe, on January 31, 2026.
A statement to the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) Limited on Thursday said Ms Otomewo would remain the organisation’s scribe in an acting capacity, pending the ratification and appointment of a substantive company secretary at the next board meeting.
She was described in the notice signed by the Managing Director of the firm, Mr Oyeyemi Olusoji, as “a results-driven executive with 22 years of experience in driving business growth, leading high-performing teams, and delivering innovative solutions.”
The acting secretary is also said to be “a collaborative leader with a passion for mentoring and developing talent.”
“The company assures the investing public that all Company Secretariat responsibilities and regulatory obligations will continue to be discharged in full compliance with the Companies and Allied Matters Act, applicable regulations, and the Nigerian Exchange Limited Listing Rules,” the disclosure assured.
Meanwhile, the board thanked Ms Attoe “for professionalism and contributions to the Company during the period of her engagement and wishes her well in her future endeavours.”
By Adedapo Adesanya
The Russian government on Thursday confirmed it has blocked the WhatsApp messaging service, as it moves to further control information flow in the country.
It urged Russians to use a new state-backed platform called Max instead of the Meta-owned service.
WhatsApp issued a statement earlier saying Russia had attempted to “fully block” its messaging service in the country to force people toward Max, which it described as a “surveillance app.”
“Today the Russian government attempted to fully block WhatsApp in an effort to drive people to a state-owned surveillance app,” WhatsApp posted on social media platform X.
“Trying to isolate over 100 million users from private and secure communication is a backwards step and can only lead to less safety for people in Russia,” it said, adding: “We continue to do everything we can to keep users connected.”
Russia’s latest move against social media platforms and messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram comes amid a wider attempt to drive users toward domestic and more easily controlled and monitored services, such as Max.
Russia’s telecoms watchdog, Roskomnadzor, has accused messaging apps Telegram and WhatsApp of failing to comply with Russian legislation requiring companies to store Russian users’ data inside the country, and of failing to introduce measures to stop their platforms from being used for allegedly criminal or terrorist purposes.
It has used this as a basis for slowing down or blocking their operations, with restrictions coming into force since last year.
For Telegram, it may be next, but so far the Russian government has been admittedly slowing down its operations “due to the fact that the company isn’t complying with the requirements of Russian legislation.”
The chat service, founded by Russian developers but headquartered in Dubai, has been a principal target for Roskomnadzor’s scrutiny and increasing restrictions, with users reporting sluggish performance on the app since January.
By Adedapo Adesanya
Nigerian startup, Decide, has emerged as the fourth most accurate Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent for spreadsheet tasks globally, according to results from SpreadsheetBench, a widely referenced benchmark for evaluating AI performance on real-world spreadsheet problems.
According to the founder, Mr Abiodun Adetona, the ranking places Decide alongside well-funded global AI startups, including Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
Mr Adetona, an ex-Flutterwave developer, also revealed that Decide now has over 3,000 users, including some who are paying customers, a signal to the ability of the startup to scale in the near future.
SpreadsheetBench is a comprehensive evaluation framework designed to push Large Language Models (LLMs) to their limits in understanding and manipulating spreadsheet data. While many benchmarks focus on simple table QA, SpreadsheetBench treats a spreadsheet as a complex ecosystem involving spatial layouts, formulas, and multi-step reasoning. So far, only three agents rank higher than Decide, namely Nobie Agent, Shortcut.ai, and Qingqiu Agent.
Mr Adetona said SpreadsheetBench measures how well AI agents can handle practical spreadsheet tasks such as writing formulas, cleaning messy data, working across multiple sheets, and reasoning through complex Excel workflows. Decide recorded an 82.5% accuracy score, solving 330 out of 400 verified tasks.
“The result reflects sustained investment in applied research, product iteration, and learning from real-world spreadsheet workloads across a wide range of use cases,” Mr Adetona told Business Post.
For Mr Adetona, who built Decide out of frustration with how much time professionals spend manually cleaning data, debugging formulas, and moving between sheets, “This milestone highlights how focused engineering and domain-specific AI development can deliver frontier-level performance outside of large research organisations. By concentrating on practical business data problems and building systems grounded in real user environments, we believe smaller teams can contribute meaningfully to advancing applied AI.”
“For Decide, this is a foundation for continued progress in intelligent spreadsheet and analytics automation,” he added.
-
Feature/OPED6 years agoDavos was Different this year
-
Travel/Tourism10 years ago
Lagos Seals Western Lodge Hotel In Ikorodu
-
Showbiz3 years agoEstranged Lover Releases Videos of Empress Njamah Bathing
-
Banking8 years agoSort Codes of GTBank Branches in Nigeria
-
Economy3 years agoSubsidy Removal: CNG at N130 Per Litre Cheaper Than Petrol—IPMAN
-
Banking3 years agoSort Codes of UBA Branches in Nigeria
-
Banking3 years agoFirst Bank Announces Planned Downtime
-
Sports3 years agoHighest Paid Nigerian Footballer – How Much Do Nigerian Footballers Earn