Today’s edition
Meet Muse
Good morning, and welcome back to your favourite business news roundup. A South African bank has finally figured out how to make money without charging its customers, while a new AI app has overtaken ChatGPT in America. We might as well start there. Let’s get into it.
MARKETS
CART BLANCHE
Meta’s Muse does not chat with you, but opens a browser and does the shopping itself
The top free app in America right now is not a chatbot. Meta put Muse onto the App Store on 8 September, and over the weekend it passed ChatGPT to number one.
You do not ask it things. You hand it a goal, in its own app or in WhatsApp, and it opens a browser, fills in the forms, negotiates on your behalf and pays with a one-time card so your real details stay hidden. It keeps working after you close the app and comes back when it needs a decision, and a second program called Sentinel has to approve anything that leaves for the internet.
Twelve days in:
- Muse has been downloaded 1.8 million times against ChatGPT’s 1.3 million over the same first twelve days.
- Those are Apptopia’s estimates, narrowed to iPhones in the United States and Canada so the two launches compare.
- Amazon has blocked Muse from amazon.com, while Shopify signed it up in the same week.
Muse is only rolling out in the US for now, so South Africans cannot use it yet. But for South African businesses, what is happening there offers a glimpse of what could eventually arrive here. If agents like this do take off, businesses may need to prepare for more than simply using AI internally. They may also have to work out how their businesses communicate, transact and work with AI agents acting on behalf of other people.
ZERO SUM
A South African bank has broken even on 100,000 customers, where most rivals needed millions
A bank that charges you nothing has to earn it somewhere else, and Bank Zero’s somewhere is the cash sitting in its customers’ accounts. It earns interest from investing those deposits, meaning the more money customers keep with the bank, the more money Bank Zero can make without charging them fees. Its deposit book has more than doubled in a year to about R860 million, and in August it was enough: Bank Zero turned its first monthly profit, less than 5 years after opening to the public.
The number that makes it unusual is how few customers it needed. Comparable entrants have had to reach well over a million to cover their costs; Bank Zero says it built its own core banking platform and got there at 100,000. It has about 275,000 now. Business accounts, which the original business case put at a tenth of the book, make up 18% of it. The other half of the answer arrived in April, when fintechs and retailers started issuing their own cards on Bank Zero’s plumbing, an arrangement that already carries half a million customers.
It still cannot lend. That application and a foreign exchange one are sitting with the regulators, with answers expected about when Lesaka’s R1.1 billion purchase is decided.
BAGEL BITE
What is the capital city of Australia?
A. Sydney
B. Melbourne
C. Canberra
DOING THE ROUNDS
Building fibre networks costs money long before they make any, which is why Remgro’s telecoms arm has been a drag. But CIVH, which owns Vumatel and Dark Fibre Africa through Maziv, has now swung from a R93 million loss to a R319 million contribution to group earnings. A big reason is Vodacom. It bought 30% of Maziv on 1 December with cash and its own fibre assets. Only 4 months of those assets are included in this year’s numbers, and Remgro says it’s open to more deals. Full story →
For ten years a Google laptop has meant the cheap one on the shelf. Pre-orders opened on Monday for Googlebook, an Android machine with the desktop parts of ChromeOS underneath and Gemini wired through it, built by Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo, not by Google. Sign in and your phone’s settings, passwords and messages come across with it. The $899 in the announcement buys one model, Acer’s, and four of the five cost more than $1,000. South Africa is not on the 4 October launch list. Full story →
Aveng has been building things in South Africa since 1889. On 1 October it gets its third chief executive in nine months. Fraser Wyllie takes over from interim boss David Simpson, who steps down as CEO and director on the same day. Wyllie is not a new face. He has run Aveng’s McConnell Dowell business in New Zealand since 2017, where his job was fixing contracts that were losing money. He inherits a group that turned over R26.4 billion last year and is worth R545 million on the JSE. Full story →
Filling a tank of diesel has been getting dearer all year, and October will make it worse. European diesel futures closed at an all-time high last week, more than double January's level, after the Iran and Ukraine wars cut exports from Russia and Saudi Arabia. Crude is not the whole story. Middle East shipments halved between March and August, and the International Energy Agency says refineries are running flat out. South African diesel is up over R9 a litre this year, and mid-September data pointed to a R1.98 bump next month. Full story →
WEATHER
BAGEL GAMES
Have you got what it takes to win today’s Wordle? Play here →
THE ANSWER
As for the Bagel Bite, the answer is: C. Canberra
When Australia became a federation, Sydney and Melbourne both wanted to be the capital, so a brand-new city was built between them as a compromise. Canberra was purpose-designed for the role and became the seat of government. It is home to Parliament House and many national institutions. Though far smaller than Sydney, it is where the country is officially run.
That’s your Wednesday sorted. Enjoyed it? Forward it on, a friend can subscribe in a click. Written by the Business Bagel crew.