Settling up: the state of digital payments in South Africa
Behind every tap, swipe and approval notification sits a layer of infrastructure most people never see. When a purchase is verified online, or a banking app asks a customer to confirm a transaction, software is quietly shuttling information between the bank that issued the card and the bank of the person or business being paid. One of the companies providing that plumbing is BPC, a Switzerland-based payment processing firm whose SmartVista platform runs in the background of daily financial life across roughly 150 countries. South Africa, its country manager says, is the fastest-growing region in the company.
That growth is being tested against a demanding operational reality. At a recent BPC conference for international clients, the company outlined contracts with tier-one banks whose systems, in some cases, have been running on technology three decades old. Craig Albertson, BPC’s country manager for South Africa, told Daily Maverick that the names of those new customers will be disclosed in December or the first quarter of next year. The migration work itself is the hard part. “The projects that we’re doing with our new customers are mega-complicated,” he said, and moving from the old systems to the new is, roughly speaking, a two-year journey. Compounding the challenge, the workforce that knows how to operate the legacy systems is reaching retirement age.
The delivery bottleneck is not purely technical. Albertson credited BPC’s other customers, the digital innovators, with forcing traditional banks to change their business models, become more flexible and take products to market faster. BPC itself has designs on becoming a household name and is setting up a new legal entity in South Africa, a step that formalises its growing footprint in the country’s payments infrastructure.
What gets delivered matters as much as how fast it arrives. One visible change for cardholders could be how accounts are categorised. Albertson described a shift away from the familiar financial tier system, where standard, gold and platinum cards are usually based on income levels or spending patterns, toward lifestyle-based products, a move he likened to what e-commerce has been doing now arriving in banking.
Meanwhile, the same modernisation pressure applies to fraud and speed. Account-to-account payments, in which money moves directly rather than through a card network, are taking hold, and as Geoffrey Tunbridge, BPC’s Asia-Pacific head of presales, noted, all payments are instant from the customer’s point of view. “Instant payments are final, so fraud must be stopped before money moves,” he said. Artificial intelligence cuts both ways here: AI-driven profiling can help stop fraud, while bots have become far more adept at swindling payers and payees alike. Avin Ruthipaul, chief information officer of lending products at Standard Bank, offered a note of caution on readiness, saying “I think issuing is not ready for agentic AI,” and framing the pile of new worries as a kind of “cognitive debt” for boardrooms. Tunbridge added that customers are leaving banks for value-added fintech services such as invoices and stockkeeping, and that the siloes and barriers of payments are gone.
Delivery to the unbanked and underbanked remains the sector’s hardest test. According to the South African Reserve Bank, about 55% of South Africans earning a monthly salary of R1,250 use cash only, and 24% mostly use cash; the bank predicted in a 2026 report that cash will still be preferred by 40% of consumers in the future. Bank fees are a major driver of that preference. GoTyme, which offers free bank accounts to all, illustrates the gap between rollout and real usage: Jimmy Sounes, its managing executive of Card Strategy, said the bank has 13 million registered customers but only about five million actively transacting. GoTyme describes its profitability as a volume game built on lower margins, and lending is set to become a big part of the business after it acquired a lending joint venture with Sanlam last year. BPC’s payment tech will underpin the new offering, expected to go live next year. Given that GoTyme actively targets lower-income customers, how it frames those loans will be a real measure of its commitment to economic empowerment.
Public transport is another frontier where payment infrastructure meets delivery on the ground. BPC’s O-City product, described by Albertson as the SmartVista platform geared for transit fare collection, lets commuters tap in and out of a network using a token on a card, phone, QR code or smartwatch. Through a partnership with a company called Calmex, O-City is already used in Johannesburg’s on-again-off-again Rea Vaya metrobus system. BPC is in discussions with other municipalities it cannot yet name, including scenarios like capacity planning for taxis. Albertson called the taxi industry a very hard nut to crack, one many people have tried to crack in South Africa. He argued that any fare system must be account-based rather than tied to loaded cards, so that commuters are not stranded by malfunctioning machines or left out of pocket when a card is lost or stolen. Digitised transport data, he said, would help cities understand commuting pathways, since the only way to do that is to follow the money.
Yet better data does not automatically mean better lives. The cost of transport is a major burden for many South Africans, particularly those living in neighbourhoods that developed from segregation. A Competition Commission report published in March, as Daily Maverick previously reported, shows roughly half of rural and township households spend their money outside of eKasi, citing limited local supply, while township shops have struggled to enter formal trading spaces like malls because of prohibitive rental costs, not preference. BPC paints an appealing picture of integration, imagining a tourist landing in Cape Town, downloading an app, loading a wallet and using any City of Cape Town service immediately. The question that remains is who is left out of these improved systems, and whether the reason is that they are not financially accessible. High payment technology adoption does not equal widespread financial stability, and South Africans will need to watch whether the structures being built actually make everyone’s lives better, or only the lives of those who already have what they need.