Richard Simanga Ngwenya, head of Honeybadger Family Office 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.”
Africa Energy Week: making energy projects bankable
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.”
Connected Banking Summit: Real-Time Payments in Southern Africa
A day earlier, on 14 October in Johannesburg, Ngwenya will sit on the Connected Banking Summit Power Panel ‘Payments Modernisation & 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.”
Africa Tech Festival: the fintech nobody sees
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 ten customers, ten thousand, or across several African markets.”
