Ngwenya joins panels on Africa’s financial infrastructure

Richard Simanga Ngwenya, Head of Honeybadger Family Office (https://Honeybadger.Africa) and Founder of Nisela Capital, will speak at three industry events in South Africa this October and November: Africa Energy Week (AEW) 2026 and Africa Tech Festival, both at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC), and the Connected Banking Summit in Johannesburg.

The panels cover different industries but Ngwenya sees the same question running through all of them: whether Africa has the financial and digital plumbing to turn promising projects and businesses into ones that can attract capital and grow.

“We tend to treat energy, banking and technology as separate conversations, but in practice they keep running into the same problem,” said Ngwenya. “Capital needs confidence, and businesses need systems that actually work.”

On 15 October, Ngwenya will join the AEW panel “Solving the Offtaker Confidence Problem in Africa - Is Digital Infrastructure a Viable, Bankable Solution?”

The panel will look at whether digital payments, AI-based credit and risk assessment, cloud data platforms, interoperable energy systems and smart metering can close the confidence gap between developers, financiers, utilities, governments and end users. Ngwenya’s focus is on what these tools do to the way lenders and investors price risk.

“In a lot of African markets, perceived risk decides whether capital shows up at all,” said Ngwenya. “Better information and real visibility over payments can change that calculation.”

A day earlier, on 14 October in Johannesburg, Ngwenya will sit on the Connected Banking Summit Power Panel “Payments Modernization & Real-Time Rails in Southern Africa”, which will examine how banks, fintechs and regulators are responding to demand for faster, interoperable payment systems.

He speaks as Executive Chair of Wynk Group, whose WynkPay platform was built for African merchants dealing with fragmented payments, reconciliation and the day-to-day running of their businesses.

“The transaction is only part of it,” said Ngwenya. “A merchant needs to see what came in, reconcile it and know where the business stands at the end of the day. That’s where most of the value is.”

On 17 November, also at the CTICC, Ngwenya will join the Africa Tech Festival panel “The Invisible Fintech,” which looks at the systems behind Africa’s digital economy: payment rails, APIs, identity and compliance, settlement and data.

The topic sits close to Honeybadger’s investment thesis. Consumer-facing fintech has drawn most of the attention and funding, but Honeybadger also sees opportunity in the infrastructure those businesses depend on.

“Some of the most important technology is technology the end user never sees,” said Ngwenya. “What sits behind a product decides whether it works for 10 customers, 10 000, or across several African markets.”

Ngwenya has spent more than 20 years in African financial services, across institutional banking, investment advisory, asset management and principal investment. He worked at Deloitte, Barclays Africa and Investec before founding Nisela Capital in 2011, an investment management and advisory business whose group has more than R4-billion in assets under management.

He has advised on and led transactions totalling more than R50-billion across Africa, including the Northam Platinum/Zambezi transaction, which received the 2022 DealMakers Corporate Finance Deal of the Year award.

In August 2026 he launched Honeybadger Family Office in Johannesburg, bringing the family’s investment activity together under three mandates: scaling African financial services and fintech businesses, investing in AI applied to financial services and working hands-on with early-stage companies.

“Africa’s financial services sector does not lack ambition or demand,” said Ngwenya. “What it lacks is patient capital paired with operational depth: investors who will sit with a business through the unglamorous work of building systems, compliance, distribution and trust.”