Welcome to the third – and largest – issue of Payments.
We like to think that the size of this year’s magazine reflects just how much is happening in the local and international payments ecosystem, not just our appetite for writing about said ecosystem. If you’ve been keeping up with the changes the way we have, you’ll know there’s been a lot of buzz about the South African Reserve Bank’s (SARB) Payments Ecosystem Modernisation (PEM) programme, and rightly so. The evolution of SARB’s Vision 2025, PEM aims to leverage the considerable resources and skills of the country’s financial sector, under the Reserve Bank’s guidance, to modernise our payments infrastructure. This is complemented by SARB’s proposed Authorisation Framework, which introduces a shift to activity-based regulation in the financial ecosystem, meaning nonbank entities can participate more directly in payment activities. Read our story on (page 20) to unpack the implications of these developments.
A big part of payment modernisation is migrating legacy systems to cloud-based ones, enabling organisations to implement new solutions in a modular fashion without reinventing the wheel (page 63), which is great news for large retailers that can’t afford downtime and don’t want to expose their infrastructure (page 55).
This is building depth in the payments ecosystem and creating a sort of “co-opetition” where banks, fintechs and infrastructure providers collaborate to advance their layer of the stack while competing where their roles overlap (turn to page 90).
Utilising overseas cloud services, however, has major regulatory implications for financial institutions that must comply with the data sovereignty regulations set out in the Protection of Personal Information Act (page 22).
Also essential is optimisation, which can mean the difference between a denied message and a completed sale (read more on page 37). In this context, efficient digital payment systems are shifting from cost centre to engine for revenue growth for merchants that are also increasingly expecting quick and seamless onboarding, developer-first portals and robust support (find out more on page 60). What does this mean for good old cash?! Well, it’s not disappearing any time soon, but the costs of working with it for players across the spectrum mean that making digital payments more affordable is a major priority (page 67). You may also start seeing more of your rands tokenised into stablecoins, which are an evolution of cryptocurrency that facilitates easier cross-border payments (see page 89). The same tokenisation technology is freeing up liquidity and broadening investment options for businesses (see page 74).
Beyond that, we look at the importance of consolidating physical and digital payment data (see page 32) and infrastructure (page 48), the rise of agentic e-commerce (page 28), the evolution of fuel cards (page 99) and prepaid payroll cards (page 80), and so much more.
Hopefully, our efforts have paid off, and you enjoy this publication (at least more than that dreadful pun).
Anthony Sharpe, Editor
Browse through the full magazine below (zoom in or go full screen for ease of reading):
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.