Sitting down {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? You're not gonna believe this, but new reports claim OpenAI pays humans to review your chats with ChatGPT (so it can improve how it answers). Called Project Lilly, the big concern is that one of the reviewers told reporters they sometimes see sensitive information in there. Privacy. Nightmare. 🤖

In Today's Open Letter

Failed payments and cart abandonment nearly tripled in SA online retail this year, driving 56.6% of those customers to competitor sites, so the SA arm of Africa's biggest payments provider built a direct line to one of the world's biggest e-commerce platforms…

Card decline is now the #1 driver of cart abandonment in SA (61.2%, up sharply from 27.9% in 2025). And, according to World Wide Worx's 2026 Online Retail Report, the biggest driver of card decline in SA's R159 billion e-commerce sector is checkout or website error (60.7%).

Why? Well, in SA, we don't have native payments for most of the big platforms. We have, for example, 25'866 Shopify stores (one of the biggest in the world with 3-7 million active stores), but Shopify Payments is not available in South Africa. So our shops need to install gateway apps just to accept payments.

And that redirect is what World Wide Worx says is SA's next big e-commerce challenge: "checkout and authentication flow, not gateway choice, is the single highest-value lever for conversion this year."

The US fixed it and had amazing success

In 2013, Stripe and Shopify worked together to build a native checkout on Stripe's infrastructure, specifically to kill the need for that redirect. That's what Shopify Payments is, and it still runs on Stripe today.

And, you guessed it, it's just gone live in SA…

Finally! Direct Shopify payments are here

Paystack (Stripe's African arm) is launching Paystack Onsite Checkout and Paystack Terminal (POS) to give SA stores:

Paystack SA says their top SA Shopify Stores have a 99% transaction success rate, so obvs we're excited to see what it does. See how to set up the integration here, or see if it's a good fit for you here.

We're watching this space…

PS: On 22 September in Cape Town, we are hosting a special Checkout Uninterrupted event, where we bring 7 top SA e-commerce experts (including Shopify specialists and operators who've already made it big) to show how to sell better online and in-store. There are only 40 seats, and you have to apply to be invited to the event — do so here right now.

Superhuman just bought Fathom. The AI email company (itself the Grammarly-owned rebrand) has acquired the meeting-notetaker, folding call transcripts and follow-ups into the same assistant that already runs your inbox. The bet: one agent across email and meetings beats two apps that each do half the job. Read more.

Both big labs came for finance in the same week. OpenAI shipped ChatGPT for Financial Services, built for investment banking and equity research, while Anthropic launched Claude for Financial Advisors, connectors and skills for research, prep and documentation. The vertical land grab is on.

Human-in-the-loop, defined properly. Praelexis closes its agent series with the four gates: attention, volition, conscience and disposition are the points where an agent should stop and a human should sign off. It's the clearest map yet of where your judgement actually belongs. Read it here.

Like most founders, one Joburg owner-operator kept everything in a folder on their laptop: staff payslips, ID copies, bank details. "I knew it was wrong," he says, after it all got compromised one day. "But we'd always done it that way. It was only when my laptop got stolen that I understood what we'd been sitting on."

That laptop is costly in two ways:

Most founders know the folder is a problem. Almost none have fixed it.

🎓 AI's Homework Trap. New research says students on an unguarded ChatGPT-style tutor scored 127% better, but when you take the tool away, they scored 17% worse than kids who never had it. Design decides whether AI builds skill or removes it.

🔞 The EU Comes for Kids. Brussels wants to ban under-13s from social media and flip the burden of proof onto platforms to prove they're safe. Hmm, where have we seen this before?

🏦 A Lesson in Financial Inclusion. Botswana just showed the gap that defines African fintech and proved that you don’t need to get someone a bank account to make them bankable. Interesting…

💳 Cloud, Sorted. Cloud got complicated, and it doesn't have to stay that way. Cloud on Demand gives you a named account manager, an ISO 27001-certified platform, Microsoft and AWS practices and local support, all starting with a form and a warm phone call.*

🔧 Hardware Is the New Moat. Software used to be the head start. Now AI writes a chunk of it, and a rival rebuilds your product in a weekend. The advantage is now hardware, and companies that own the product chain will lead. Octoco helps you unlock it.*

* From our partners. Find all the best service providers for your business in our Founder Stack.

Founders like Rawk are building brilliant stuff all across SA. The Founder Collab is where they find each other. Come build with us.

Yesterday, we showed you how AccountGo does the books for tradesmen, asking if you could hand the bank a balance sheet tomorrow. Most here need a long, panicked weekend first…

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ ✅ Yes, books are spotless (27%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 😅 Eventually… after a panicked (loooong) weekend (55%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🙈 A balance what? (18%)

Social media just overtook TV and news websites as the world's main source of news.

💡 Social media now commands 54%, edging past TV (52%) and news websites (51%), the first time it has led all three at once.

💡 The lines that used to dominate have caved: TV has slid from 77% in 2013, news websites from nearly 80%, while radio (21%) and print (16%, down from 55%) keep falling.

For anyone building and reaching people, distribution now runs through feeds you don't really own and can't bill, so businesses have to design around the new normal.

Indie Hackers #53, 17 Sept, Cape Town: Lean-coffee night for tech founders, pizza and drinks in, at MindJoy. R30. Get tickets.

Linda Reddy Book Pre-Launch Dinner, 23 Sept, Cape Town: Nando's global exec on the unspoken rules of getting ahead in corporate, over dinner at Cape Grace. R950. Get tickets.

FinMaster Friday, 2 Oct, Stellenbosch: Money-themed board game night, buy spaza shops and survive load shedding. R50. Get tickets.

Powered by Radi. Want your business event in front of 36’000 The Open Letter readers? Host it on Radi, and it lands here.

🃏 Next Level: Look away, this magic trick is witchcraft.

🤫 Wow Site: The Quiet Map measures human noise through seismometers around the world, refreshing hourly to show the current quietest and loudest places on Earth.