Johannesburg, South Africa, 10 October 2026 – Richard Simanga Ngwenya, Head of Honeybadger Family Officeand Founder of Nisela Capital, will speak at three major industry events in South Africa this October and November. The events include African Energy Week (AEW) 2026 and Africa Tech Festival, both at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC), and the Connected Banking Summit in Johannesburg.
Although the discussions cover different industries, Ngwenya sees a common challenge: whether Africa has the financial and digital infrastructure needed to attract investment and help promising businesses 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 an African Energy Week panel titled “Solving the Offtaker Confidence Problem in Africa – Is Digital Infrastructure a Viable, Bankable Solution?”
The discussion will examine how digital payments, artificial intelligence (AI)-based credit assessments, cloud data platforms and smart metering can improve investor confidence. It will also explore how interoperable energy systems can strengthen relationships between developers, financiers, utilities, governments and consumers.
Ngwenya will focus on how these technologies influence the way lenders and investors assess and price risk in African energy projects.
“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.”
On 14 October, Ngwenya will participate in the Connected Banking Summit in Johannesburg. He will join the Power Panel discussion, “Payments Modernization & Real-Time Rails in Southern Africa.”
The panel will examine how banks, financial technology (fintech) companies and regulators are responding to growing demand for faster, more efficient and interoperable payment systems.
Ngwenya will contribute insights from his role as Executive Chair of Wynk Group. Its WynkPay platform serves African merchants managing fragmented payment systems, transaction reconciliation and daily business operations.
“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, Ngwenya will join the Africa Tech Festival panel titled “The Invisible Fintech” at the CTICC in Cape Town.
The discussion will focus on the infrastructure supporting Africa’s digital economy. This includes payment systems, application programming interfaces (APIs), digital identity, compliance, settlement processes and data management.
These technologies are central to Honeybadger Family Office’s investment strategy. While consumer-facing fintech businesses have attracted significant attention and funding, the firm also sees investment opportunities in the underlying infrastructure supporting their operations.
“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 ten customers, ten thousand, or across several African markets.”
Ngwenya has more than 20 years of experience in African financial services, spanning institutional banking, investment advisory, asset management and principal investment.
He previously worked at Deloitte, Barclays Africa and Investec before founding Nisela Capital in 2011. The investment management and advisory business operates within a group managing more than R4 billion in assets.
Throughout his career, Ngwenya has advised on and led transactions worth more than R50 billion across Africa. These include the Northam Platinum/Zambezi transaction, which received the 2022 DealMakers Corporate Finance Deal of the Year award.
In August 2026, Ngwenya launched Honeybadger Family Office in Johannesburg to consolidate the family’s investment activities.
The firm focuses on three investment areas: scaling African financial services and fintech businesses, applying artificial intelligence to financial services, and providing hands-on support to 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.”
Across the three events, Ngwenya’s discussions will examine how stronger financial systems, digital infrastructure and investment practices can help African businesses attract capital and expand into new markets
