Business
Car Workers End Strike In South Africa
A South African union
representing car workers has agreed a new pay deal, ending a month-long strike that has crippled the industry.
The British Broadcasting Corporation reported that the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa accepted a 10 per cent pay rise this year and eight per cent in the next two years.
The strike in the car components industry caused severe disruption, especially to exports.
Last week BMW said it had stopped “all future plans” to expand in South Africa because of the industrial action.
Under the deal, pay at small-to-medium-sized car parts firms will only raise wages by nine per cent in the first year, followed by eight per cent in the subsequent two years.
“The strike was very hard for us,” Irvin Jim, the general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, told reporters.
The car components’ strike followed industrial action by workers at car manufacturers themselves, which hit production at BMW, Ford, Nissan and General Motors and cost an estimated $2 billion in lost output.
Contributory Pension Scheme contributors rise to 5.6 million.
About 5.6 million workers have registered under the Contributory Pension Scheme, according to the National Pension Commission (PenCom).
Latest figures from the commission revealed that the scheme had also generated a large pool of investible funds of over N3.5 trillion invested in various financial instruments, a huge growth when compared with estimated pension liabilities in the public sector prior to the reform of the industry in 2004.
The Acting Director-General, PenCom, Mrs. Chinelo Anohu-Amazu, said the process of the major amendment of the Pension Reform Act, 2004 was currently at the final stages of consideration by the National Assembly.
She said the commission had recently organised an interactive workshop in order to acquaint Judges of the superior courts with the basic understanding of the CPS to enable them adjudicate on pension matters effectively.
PenCom, she added, had also established a call centre for use by members of the public so as to enhance its service delivery through an efficient complaints resolution process.
According to her, the commission embarked on the establishment of offices in all the six geo-political zones of the country in order to decentralise its activities and bring them closer to the contributors and retirees.
“With our presence in the South-West zone now, we expect all stakeholders to avail themselves of our services by visiting our office to make enquiries, lodge complaints and seek enlightenment on the Contributory Pension Scheme,” Anohu-Amazu said.
The acting director-general said due to the commission’s renewed focus on efficient service delivery; it had sought to reduce the need for contributors and retirees to travel from various parts of the country to Abuja before accessing its services.
The presence in the different parts of the country, she added, would facilitate closer interaction with the state pension offices by assisting them to comply with the CPS.
Cornerstone of Financial Services
A survey of more than 1 000 global finance leaders undertaken by digital payment network Ripple shows that 72% of respondents believe they need to offer a digital asset solution to remain competitive.
According to Ripple, leaders from the banking, fintech, corporate and asset management sector have made it clear that the “digital asset revolution is happening now”.
“Digital assets are quickly becoming a cornerstone of financial services, underpinned by progressive regulation, growing interest from Tier-1 banks, a steady consumer shift from banks to fintech providers, and booming stablecoin adoption,” Ripple says.
The survey was conducted in early 2026 and the findings released in March.
Stablecoin Boon or Bane?
Ripple has experienced significant success in the stablecoin sector since launching its Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin in 2024.
With a market cap of $1.56 billion, it is considered a major regulated player in the market.
No doubt the platform was pleased to learn through its own survey that financial leaders were most bullish about stablecoins.
Roughly three-quarters of respondents believed they could boost cash-flow efficiency and unlock trapped working capital.
Ripple noted that finance leaders were thinking about stablecoins as more than “just a new way to execute payments”; instead, they viewed them as effective tools for treasury management.
In March 2026, Ripple began testing a new trade finance model built around RLUSD in a bid to increase the speed of cross-border payments.
The pilot initiative, developed alongside supply chain finance company Unloq [https://unloq.com], is running on the XRP Ledger inside a testing framework developed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
The Asian city-state is one of the platform’s biggest growth markets.
The idea behind the project is to see whether stablecoin-based settlement can streamline trade finance, too often hampered by reliance on intermediaries and slow reconciliation.
The only potential drawback is that if the initiative takes off, the Ripple to USD price could be negatively affected.
Ripple has always championed its native XRP token as a bridge asset, the “middleman” in the process of a financial institution turning dollars in the US into pounds in the UK, for example.
Ripple converts dollars into XRP and then back into pounds.
If RLUSD can do exactly the same thing, questions will be asked about XRP’s relevance.
That is a bridge Ripple will have to cross if it gets to that point.
Tokenisation Partners
Another interesting finding from Ripple’s survey is that most banks and asset managers are seeking tokenisation partners to help execute their strategies.
Some 89% of respondents said digital asset storage and custody were top priority. “Token servicing/lifecycle management also ranks highly for banks at 82%, while asset managers place greater emphasis on primary distribution at 80%,” Ripple found.
The survey also revealed that just more than half of fintechs and financial institutions want an infrastructure provider that can offer a “one-stop-shop solution”. This rose to 71% among corporate financial leaders.
Ripple attributes this to institutions and firms wanting uncomplicated, cohesive systems.
Infrastructure Rules
In its final analysis, Ripple says companies across the board are looking for partners and solutions that are “secure, compliant, battle-tested and that enable growth and execution”.
“The message is clear: infrastructure decisions made today will shape competitive positioning tomorrow.”
No surprise that this is precisely where Ripple is placing much of its focus.
