bourse, one of its executives even cosied up to the stock exchange’s librarian, begging him (in the name of God) to release a USB drive where he was rumoured to store company details as a pastime. The company’s co-founders dreamed up the idea in the mid-2010s while studying in London.“We saw Bloomberg and thought it was sexy,” recalls Preston Ideh, the chief executive. They initially copied the American company’s mix of news and data. Yet when subscriber growth turned out to be insufficient to support the media operation, they focused squarely on financial information. Not all of it is as inaccessible as Nigerian stock-market secrets. But little is readily available. Stears analysts have, among other things, had a loose- lipped employee slip them a ballpark figure of an undisclosed deal; monitored podcasts with startup founders who might share a bit too much; reverse-engineered the website of Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics to scrape it for historical macroeconomic data; and even become citizens in countries where, as in Kenya, a domestic passport eases access to official repositories (and where hiring a local would cost more). The firm can afford to go to such lengths because a lot of the data it gathers is for bespoke projects where customers such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development or private-equity firms interested in Africa’s sports-betting market pay up to $100,000 a pop. But further information, plus contacts collected in the process, feeds its digital platform, where the volume of data added increased fivefold last year. This is available to clients on a subscription basis similar to Bloomberg and other Western rivals such as S&P Global’s Capital IQ and PitchBook (from which Stears has poached staff). Foreigners are increasingly interested in what Stears is offering. Its dollar revenue (a proxy for its non-Nigerian business) doubled in 2025 and made up 70% of its total licence fees, up from 18% in 2023. Over the same period the average annual licence fee paid by fund managers climbed from $2,500 to $9,500. This is still a bargain compared with $30,000 or so for a Bloomberg terminal.
Helpfully for Stears, the Western platforms currently have little interest in Africa, which accounts for a tiny fraction of the world’s financial flows. This may change as that fraction grows, which it inevitably will. By then, though, the African upstart wants to be as indispensable to the Africa-curious investor as Bloomberg is to everybody else.■ For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//finance-and-economics/2026/06/11/stears-wants-to-be- africas-bloomberg-terminal
Finance & economics | Timeless fashion A bidding war erupts for the world’s oldest bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena is suddenly all the rage June 11th 2026 FOR MONTHS Italian finance has been gripped by the €16bn ($18bn) takeover by Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), the world’s oldest surviving lender, of Mediobanca, an investment bank which also owns a 13% stake in Generali, a giant insurer. Completed last September, it was the biggest European banking merger in years. It involved the abrupt sacking of MPS’s boss by the board in April and his rapid reinstatement by shareholders. If that was not enough drama, on June 7th Banco BPM, Italy’s fourth-largest lender, proposed a tie-up with MPS that would create a heavyweight worth some €50bn. The next day Carlo Messina, boss of Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy’s biggest domestic lender, dismissed BPM’s offer as a “love letter” and
launched a rival and, he claimed, less frivolous €31bn bid for MPS. The result would build a behemoth with market value of €130bn or so. Intesa is offering MPS’s owners 16 newly issued shares of its own for every ten in MPS, plus €1 per share on top of that. That represents a premium of 12.5% on MPS’s closing share price on June 5th. Intesa has called a shareholders’ meeting for September 10th to approve the necessary issuance of shares. If both banks’ shareholders go for it, the deal would create the euro zone’s second-biggest lender by market value, after Santander of Spain. To ease trustbusters’ worries, Intesa has struck a deal with Unipol, an insurer that has the biggest holding in another Italian lender, BPER, to divvy up MPS’s retail business. Intesa would keep 625 of MPS’s 1,260 branches. The brand and many of MPS’s central operations would go to BPER, creating Italy’s third-biggest banking group. That might satisfy Italy’s trustbusters. Giorgia Meloni’s conservative—and nationalist—government would certainly prefer Intesa’s bid to Banco BPM’s. Crédit Agricole, a French bank, holds a stake of 20% in BPM. Politicians in Rome sometimes cheer on the equally drama-filled pursuit of Germany’s Commerzbank by UniCredit, another big Italian lender. They may prove less keen to let foreigners grab a bigger slice of Italian finance. ■ For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//finance-and-economics/2026/06/08/a-bidding-war-erupts- for-the-worlds-oldest-bank
Finance & economics | Hoard behaviour The world’s strategic oil reserves are running out fast They cannot hold back the energy crunch for ever June 11th 2026 MORE THAN 100 days into the third Gulf war, oil markets have shielded themselves against bad news on the battlefield. On June 8th, after renewed strikes between Iran and Israel threatened a shaky two-month ceasefire, the price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose by just 1%. Even after subsequent exchanges between America and Iran, early on June 11th it was around $93 per barrel, more than $30 below its intraday high in April. Oil markets are placid because they have found ways around the 15m barrels per day (b/d) of missing supply created by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. China has slashed its imports by roughly 5m b/d from pre-war levels; rationing has caused overall demand elsewhere to fall by a similar
amount. Brazil, Venezuela and others are pumping a bit more than before. The remainder is being filled by tapping the world’s stocks—above all from rich countries’ strategic petroleum reserves (SPRs). In March the 32 members of the International Energy Agency, a club of large oil-consuming countries, pledged to release 400m barrels from government stockpiles—the biggest co-ordinated drawdown in the IEA’s history. Just under half of those barrels have now been delivered, at the record pace of 2.5m-3m b/d. But releases may slow sharply in the coming weeks. Whether they do will help determine if oil markets keep their cool this summer. The key characters in this holiday thriller are Japan, America and Europe. At the start of the war Japan received 90% of its crude from the Middle East. It holds some of the world’s biggest reserves and was the most vocal proponent of a co-ordinated IEA release. Data from Kayrros, which tracks storage levels from orbit, shows it quietly began drawing from its SPR even before the IEA’s move in March. It then said it would release 50 days’ worth of consumption from its public stockpile—or 90m barrels—most of which has already been distributed to domestic refiners.
The pace of releases initially surged to over 1m b/d, before slowing to 0.6m b/d last month. Over the past two months local refiners have managed to replace most of what they once imported through Hormuz with oil bypassing the strait via pipeline and purchases from non-Gulf producers, in particular America, says Terazawa Tatsuya of the Institute of Energy Economics, a Japanese think-tank. This has helped Japan’s public stocks retain over 120 days of supply, above the IEA’s 90-day floor. Although Takaichi Sanae, the prime minister, has not ruled out another release altogether, she said no to one last month and may be reluctant to authorise a big drawdown. It would leave Japan’s stocks too empty for comfort, with no end in sight for the crisis and with competition for alternative sources rising everywhere, observes Christopher Haines of Energy Aspects, a consultancy. America is even more constrained. Its SPR entered the war nearly half- depleted, after a big drawdown in 2022-23, when the oil price spiked after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Even though a portion of the 172m barrels it pledged to the IEA in March has yet to be delivered, its SPR has already hit its lowest since the 1980s, when it was filled up following the Gulf oil shocks of the 1970s. The government is so anxious about its stocks that it is lending barrels rather than selling them, with borrowers obliged to return the volumes withdrawn—plus a premium of 17-26%—by 2027-29. This explains why three of the four tranches auctioned to date have been undersubscribed; some 45m barrels of the authorised release remain unawarded. Another auction is widely expected. America’s releases have brought relief beyond its shores. Many SPR barrels have made their way from salt caverns in Texas and Louisiana, through commodity traders to buyers in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Yet most analysts expect the pace of deliveries to slow in the coming weeks, from 1.4m to below 1m b/d. Pressure is dropping in the caverns, which risk damage if it gets too low. Bayou Choctaw, the smallest site, is nearly depleted, says Kevin Book of ClearView Energy Partners, a consultancy; others cannot pump more fast enough because of limited pipeline capacity. And the entire SPR has a statutory floor of 150m barrels, just 90m barrels below the level at the end of the current release.