BizNews Radio

In this week’s NdB Sunday Show, intelligence analyst Jasmine Opperman of Fulcrum Analytics, reveals to Chris Steyn that there are 14 active cryptocurrency wallets linked to Hamas in South Africa. “We know that Hamas has offices in South Africa. We know that they allowed freedom to move…And that there are definite financial streams going to Hamas, going to Hezbollah.” Opperman also shares the latest information on the South African recently kidnapped by ISIS in Mozambique, and further describes how ISIS-trained operatives take part in criminal operations in South Africa. “...the door for ISIS in South Africa is organised crime.” As for why the South African government would allow terrorist organisations to operate here, Opperman says: “...our government is ideologically blinded by the history of support they gained…it is as if the South African government is confusing their past with foreign policy.” Meanwhile, Opperman warns that US President Donald Trump has made a “fatal mistake” and that “we have entered fast and furious radicalisation…my concern is that the next generation of violent extremists, violent terrorists has already been generated.”

At the close of BNC#9, Alec Hogg sat down with David Shapiro and Piet Viljoen to unpack the conference. Viljoen made the numbers case for South Africa: bar the two big banks, every stock in his portfolio trades at a discount of thirty percent or more to what he thinks it is worth, and the market is effectively paying investors fifteen percent a year just to stay put. Shapiro made the human case, and the uncomfortable one, running through what three days without power does to a family in Johannesburg, and why he still believes America out-competes an ageing Europe on sheer will to win.

Piet le Roux runs the organisation that has taken on the South African state more than any other business group this year, and he came to BNC#9 to explain why. Sakeliga beat the government on foot and mouth disease vaccines, international airline licensing and estate agents' BEE certificates in 2026 alone, and it wasn't finished. In this Q&A with Piet Viljoen, le Roux traced Sakeliga's strategy back four hundred years to a merchant alliance most people have never heard of, explained why the organisation deliberately avoids chasing individual officials into court, and previewed an AI system built to read every government gazette so his team doesn't have to. He also took audience questions on a minister's response to Sakeliga's court wins, on personal accountability, and on what a self-funded, twenty-person team can realistically take on next: the Reserve Bank.

Bryan Brownrigg was never a currency trader. He sold foreign exchange to Standard Bank's institutional clients for 23 years. But when the Competition Commission decided that 28 banks had run a single conspiracy to rig the rand, his name went into the complaint anyway, and it took a decade and a Constitutional Court ruling to get it out again. Financial Mail editor Rob Rose told Alec Hogg how one wrong assumption metastasised into a case that dragged banks, courts and taxpayers through ten years of litigation, and why Brownrigg is only one entry on a longer list. A tribunal sat on a merger decision for six years and then gave a reason for the delay that turned out not to be true. A R14 billion Vodacom fibre deal collapsed. A black-owned retailer was blocked from selling its own business. Rose's argument is blunt: South Africa's competition watchdogs have stopped policing competition, and started doing something else.

In this interview with Irakli Rekhviashvili, Tyme Group co-founder Coenraad Jonker gives his take on what actually protects a digital bank once the competition catches up, and why he thinks the old rules of banking no longer apply. On competitive advantage, he says: "I'm saying to my guys increasingly, I don't think there is a moat. I liken it to the time when people lived in walled cities with trenches dug around them. And then airplanes arrived, and people could fly over cities, and those walls became totally irrelevant." On why so many banks still fail to serve the poor profitably, he states: "It's not the customer that's the problem, it's the banks that's the problem." Jonker, whose group counts Brazil's Nubank among its backers, also puts a number on the group's New York listing ambitions, revealing: "I think it's more likely we'll be ready in 2030 than in 2028." He traces it all back to Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital, which he read during his MBA at GIBS in 2001. "I read the book in 2001 when I was busy with my MBA at GIBS... it lit a fire. It sort of started me thinking completely differently about the challenges of financial inclusion and financial exclusion."