Tuesday, 16 August 2022

Partner(s)

Good morning!

Dennis here,

What exactly happened at PiggyVest? Is our money safe? Customers began reporting that their withdrawals weren't going through in the early hours of yesterday.

What can I say? Not good. But more importantly not now that central banks and investors are scrutinising the African tech ecosystem.

Below are the tech stories and news you need to know to start your day, carefully curated by Technext.

Summary of the news

Pastel, a Nigerian bookkeeping and digital platform has raised $5.5M
PiggyVest experienced abrupt downtime for more than 12 hours
A new report shows that AIs are affecting Worker Productivity Score for the worse
Snapchat said that its paid subscription is on track to be a success

Pastel raises $5.5M

Pastel, a startup in the second category which has been under the radar for more than a year, is announcing a seed raise of $5.5 million led by pan-African venture capital firm TLcom Capital. TechCrunch reports that other VC firms such as Global Founders Capital (GFC), Golden Palm Investments, DFS Labs, Ulu Ventures, Plug and Play, and Soma Cap also participated in the seed round. The startup raised a $620,000 pre-seed last year from some of its existing investors.

Formerly Sabi Cash, Pastel was founded by Abuzar Royesh, Olamide Oladeji and Izunna Okonkwo, Stanford graduate students who, according to co-founder and chief growth officer (CGO) Okonkwo, shares similar interests in building solutions for micro and SMBs in emerging markets, particularly from their countries of origin: Afghanistan (Royesh) and Nigeria (Oladeji and Okonkwo).

The new capital will assist Pastel in increasing its efforts in this area as it looks to expand its product offerings and develop more productivity and finance management features and tools around group savings, loans and payments for small businesses.

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PiggyVest experience downtime

PiggyVest, the Nigerian savings platform popular with millennials abruptly stopped working yesterday, leaving customers alarmed about the safety of their money. For some customers, the app holds almost all their savings.

In the early hours of yesterday, customers of PiggyVest began to lament on social media that their transactions were not going through. One user said that he was unable to access his money all through the day leaving him stranded.

PiggyVest released a statement saying that it was "experiencing a temporary downtime." The company added that withdrawals will be back soon but advised customers to turn to its Pocket App, the new social commerce platform also owned by its parent company Piggy Tech to withdraw their money.

This immediately raises questions about the efficiency of alternative to bank companies that have proliferated in recent years, especially as they face major backlash lately from monetary authorities in Kenya and Ghana.

White collar job staff complain about working hours tracking tools

Eight of the 10 largest private U.S. employers track the productivity metrics of individual workers, many in real-time, according to an examination by The New York Times.

Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require graduate degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, “idle” buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs.

But the most urgent complaint, spanning industries and incomes, is that the working world’s new clocks are just wrong: inept at capturing offline activity, unreliable at assessing hard-to-quantify tasks and prone to undermining the work itself.

UnitedHealth social workers were marked idle for lack of keyboard activity while counselling patients in drug treatment facilities, according to a former supervisor. Grocery cashiers said the pressure to quickly scan items degraded customer service, making it harder to be patient with elderly shoppers who move slowly.

Snapchat’s paid subscription is already a hit

Snap is finding early success with its paid subscription service Snapchat Plus. The company says it has amassed 1 million paid users since launching Snapchat Plus in late June.

According to The Verge, a Snapchat Plus subscription gives users early and exclusive access to features for $3.99 a month, including changing the app icon and seeing who rewatched your story. In July, the company rolled out Snapchat for desktop to subscribers — the first major feature for paid users.

The success of Plus comes at a time when Snap is signalling dissatisfaction with its performance. In addition to the hit to advertising, the company is juggling broader economic problems, slowing growth at the company, and plans to lay off employees — and the message, at least to investors, is that Snap is working on turning things around.