Chinese regulators have asked Didi Global Inc. to delist from the New York Stock Exchange, in the latest move to control the country’s tech giants, Bloomberg reports, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

The report says the country’s tech watchdog wants management to take the company off the New York Stock Exchange because of concerns about leakage of sensitive data, quoting the people, who spoke on anonymity. They said the Cyberspace Administration of China, the agency responsible for data security in the country, has directed Didi to work out precise details, subject to government approval.

Proposals under consideration include a straight-up privatization or a share float in Hong Kong followed by a delisting from the U.S., the people added. If the privatization proceeds, the proposal will likely be at least the $14 IPO price since a lower offer so soon after the June initial public offering could prompt lawsuits or shareholder resistance, the people said. If there is a secondary listing in Hong Kong, the IPO price would probably be a discount to the share price in the U.S., $8.11 as of Wednesday’s close.

Deliberations continue and it’s possible regulators will backtrack on their request, the people said. Either option would deal a severe blow to a ride-hailing giant that pulled off the largest U.S. IPO by a Chinese firm since Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s in 2014, the report said.

The move is in continuation of what started late last year. Didi has joined a host of other Chinese companies who got into the bad book of Chinese authorities. Alibaba, Ant Group and Tencent have all felt the full weight of the authorities in the tech crackdown designed to curtail the excesses of China’s tech industry.

Didi has grown to become the biggest ride-hailing company in the world, eclipsing Uber, after it purchased the American company’s  operation in China in 2016.

Didi’s trouble started when it made the decision to file for IPO with the New York Stock Exchange in July. In line with its recent reforms targeting its internet market, Chinese regulators quickly launched multiple investigations into the company. Alibaba, Tencent and others have received proportionate penalties according to the weight of their sins, and the regulator has some lined up Didi.

In July, Didi was restricted from registering new customers a few days after filing for IPO with the New York Stock Exchange, and eventually was removed from app stores in China.

While the delisting could be part of a package of punishments for Didi, the authorities are likely going to treat the ride-hailing giant the same way they treated others. The Ant Group, Alibaba and others received the government’s proposal for investment stakes in their companies that would be run by state-owned firms.

Bloomberg reported in September that Beijing’s municipal government has proposed an investment in Didi that would give state-run firms effective control. The investment could help Didi finance the repurchase of its U.S.-traded shares.

Didi is currently controlled by the management team of co-founder Cheng Wei and President Jean Liu, which received aggregate voting power of 58% after the company’s U.S. initial public offering. SoftBank and Uber Technologies Inc. are Didi’s biggest minority shareholders, according to Bloomberg.

But delisting from New York Stock Exchange wouldn’t cut all the trouble for Didi, the company will still have questions to answer at home.

“Even if Didi shifts its listing to Hong Kong, it will have to address the data security concerns that have drawn regulatory scrutiny. The company may have to give up control of its data to a third-party — again undercutting its price tag,” the report said.

However, Beijing’s move to delist Didi from NYSE could pose a big bilateral challenge to China. In the face of trade war between the US and China that has deteriorated over the years, such action could send a panic signal across.

“A withdrawal from U.S. bourses could stoke fears of an exodus of Chinese firms as Washington and Beijing quarrel about access to listed firms’ books,” Bloomberg said.

It is a concern that some officials in China are worried about. On Thursday, a senior Chinese regulatory official said such delistings would be a setback for relations with the U.S., while offering broad support for Hong Kong as an alternative venue.

The battle to protect private data has intensified in recent times, with both the U.S. and China enacting reforms targeting data-collecting companies. However, the two largest economies in the world have left room open for diplomatic solutions to their bilateral differences.

At home, China has been insouciant about the billions of dollars being wiped off its tech industry as a result of its tech crackdown, and the push for ‘common prosperity.’ But deteriorated relationship with the U.S. has broader consequences that may very much depend on how Beijing handles Didi’s NYSE listing.

Young people, start building. The greatest business in Nigeria has not been started. We’re just entering the application utility era in the nation and the cambrian moment of entrepreneurial capitalism is still at infancy.

If anyone tells you that the future does not offer a promise, ignore. Simply, Abundance is in the future.

The only way to overcome market friction is by unleashing the forces of products and services. #Build

OnePipe, a Nigerian fintech API company, has secured $3.5 million in venture funding to expand embedded finance offering, joining a host of API infrastructure players in Africa executing multi-million dollars financial services.

The seed round was co-led by African impact-focused VC Atlantic Ventures, who also co-led OnePipe’s $950,000 pre-seed round. New investors include Canaan Partners, Saison Capital, Norrsken and the Fund and Two Culture Cap. Existing investors who participated are Chris Adelsbach, Techstars, Ingressive Capital, Acquity, P1, Raba and DFS Lab and other angel investors.

OnePipe had planned to include developing an API gateway that would connect banks and fintechs using a common standard, allowing the company to execute essential open banking functions.

But the plan changed after OnePipe had established agreements with a number of financial institutions. The financial startup made the decision to take a step back and explore the area of embedded finance.

Currently, there are six banks on board as OnePipe’s financial partners.

Using OnePipe’s API platform, non-financial companies can launch and cross-sell a variety of financial services such as credit, accounts, and payments within their offers.

The fintech company raised a round of funding last year to focus on one use case of the relationship, which was to gather together the APIs of a defined set of banks and deliver embedded banking or banking as a service to customers. Non-financial institutions, or businesses in general, are able to offer banking services to their consumers as a result of its services. Customers can pay off their accounts and access credit when they need it by using OnePipe’s bank API.

OnePipe has handled more than 6.3 million transactions worth a total of $46.3 million in the ten months after switching to this model, based on the company’s statistics. From FMCG and retail to lending and agriculture, these data represent over 1 million individual accounts.

In exchange for processing transactions on these accounts, OnePipe receives a percentage of the proceeds, which it distributes to its partner banks. OnePipe takes at least 1% of the loan interest from its lending partners and divides it with businesses and partner banks.

For its expansion into additional African countries, OnePipe has entered into a strategic relationship with African logistics and freight firm Sendy, according to Ope Adeoye, the company’s founder and CEO. The company officials said they plan to form a “Stripe-Shopify-like tag group.”

The CEO explained that the company went into other African countries with a customer on the ground first. “We did a deal with Sendy that made them participate in this round, and we will then deploy the capital for expansion.” As they deploy to Egypt and South Africa, Onepipe is sure it will involve and observe from them.

There are generally three main fintech API infrastructure plays. One is data and financial accounts aggregation, where Plaid, Okra, Mono, Stitch and Pngme play.

The second is embedded finance and banking as a service, where Treasury Prime, Marqeta have taken a space. And the third is core open banking pioneered by the likes of TrueLayer. OnePipe has chosen embedded finance for reasons that Adeoye explained.

“The caveat goes like this, the moment you make a positioning play for banking as a service, all you really need is one partner bank that lets you go deep because the embedded finance [offering] is about depth and not breadth,” said the CEO.

“If you go for data aggregation or open banking in general, then you are going for breadth, not depth. So on our side, we said we’d rather go with tier two and tier three bands, where once you describe the concept to them, they get it. It powers their growth and is more valuable to them, unlike other larger financial institutions.”

Running API infrastructure on behalf of partner banks and helping them monetize it helps OnePipe to work with non-financial institutions to launch and cross-sell an array of financial services such as credit, accounts and payments within their offerings.

Let me tell you some amusing fact I’m sure you may likely not be aware of:

Do you know that you can sue a bank if their Automated Teller Machine (ATM) fails to dispense cash to you as long as you have money in that account?

Yes, you read right! 

Did that surprise you?

Well don’t take my word for it, it is the word and the decision of the court.

The Background story!

Mr. Moses G Jwan is an Ecobank Plc customer and owns an account with the bank in which an Automated Teller Machine (Atm) debit card was issued to him. He tried using the debit card to make a withdrawal in a United Bank of Africa’s ATM gallery. He was debited but cash wasn’t dispensed to him by the teller machine.

He decided to take legal action. He sued both EcoBank Plc his bank and United Bank of Africa (UBA) the bank that owns the teller machine that didn’t dispense cash to him.

The matter was dismissed in the high court for the technicality of plaintiff’s failure to discharge the burden of proof placed on him and he (Mr Moses Jwan) went on appeal and appealed to the court of appeal.

In the court of appeal, Plateau state judicial division, the court held that Automated Teller Machine (ATM)  is like a Cheque and failure of it  to dispense cash is a breach of Banker/customer duty in as much as the customer has a withdraw-able sum in the bank account.

This case is therefore a judicial precedent, laying down the precedent that if your bank’s teller machine fails to dispense cash to you while you’ve got a withdraw-able sum in the account, the bank is in breach of their duty to provide cash to you and damages will be awarded against them.

If you are interested in reading up the case, the case is reported in the Nigerian Weekly Law Report (NWLR) where it is reported: Moses Jwan V. Eco Bank Plc (2021) 10 NWLR (PT 1785 ) 449 (CA)