10 South African Entrepreneurs Who Pioneered New Payment Systems
10 South African Entrepreneurs Who Pioneered New Payment Systems. These entrepreneurs are leveraging technology to create innovative payment solutions, enhancing financial accessibility, security, and efficiency in South Africa. Their contributions are pivotal in driving the fintech revolution in the region. Below are some of the South African entrepreneurs who have pioneered innovative payment systems, transforming the financial landscape in the country:
Michael Jordaan
Michael Jordaan, former CEO of FNB, co-founded Bank Zero, a new digital bank that leverages cutting-edge technology to provide innovative banking and payment solutions. Bank Zero aims to offer low-cost, transparent banking services.
Katlego Maphai
Katlego Maphai is the Co-founder & CEO of Yoco. Yoco is one of Africa’s largest fintech companies. The company enables small businesses to thrive through open commerce. Founded in 2015 it has helped over 400,000 small businesses across South Africa accept card payments and access capital – often for the first time. The company has raised $170M from some of the leading institutional investors in the world such as TPG, Dragoneer, Partech, Velocity, Quona, Raba, 4DX and many more.
Kiaan Pillay
Kiaan Pillay is the Co-Founder and CEO of Stitch. Stitch payments solutions help businesses seamlessly connect to the financial system, enabling them to deliver a better user experience and to optimize operations. The company is modernising and improving financial infrastructure with a mission to build a financial system that works for all.
Patrice Motsepe
Patrice Motsepe is a major investor in TymeBank, South Africa’s first fully digital bank, which offers innovative payment solutions and aims to make banking more accessible to underserved communities.
Mitchan Adams
Mitchan Adams is the co-founder of Ozow, a world-class digital payment platform that simplifies transactions for customers and merchants. Designed to reinvent the typically cumbersome inter-bank payment process and provide an attractive alternative to the entrenched payment solutions that have historically been available, Ozow removes the timeous manual way of doing things and significantly speeds up transaction time so merchants are able to process more orders. Unlike a traditional EFT transaction that can take up to three minutes to process, Ozow cuts the time down to few seconds.
Paul Kent
As the CEO and co-founder of Adumo, Paul Kent leads a team of passionate and innovative professionals who are on a mission to transform the payments landscape in Africa. With over 15 years of experience in the financial services industry, he has a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities that face small and medium enterprises, especially in the digital and e-commerce space.
Lorien Gamaroff
Lorien Gamaroff is the co-founder/CEO of Centbee, a blockchain payments and cross-border remittance company. He also serves as a Bitcoin Association Ambassador. As one of the world’s foremost blockchain experts, Lorien has been invited to speak internationally on digital/cryptocurrencies and decentralised/distributed ledgers and their benefits for emerging economies. He has addressed, workshopped and advised the United Nations, IMF, World Bank, FBI and Commonwealth Secretariat, Central Banks, South African Financial Intelligence and other law enforcement agencies, professional conferences, including TEDx, and a host of professionals in multiple industries and attorneys general throughout the world.
Vahid Monadjem
Vahid Monadjem is co-founder and CEO of Nomanini, an Africa-focused pioneering fintech platform for the informal retail ecosystem. The platform connects the informal retail ecosystem around MSMEs, including financial service providers, distributors and manufacturers by integrating payments, working capital, and data analytics to unlock the latent potential of Africa’s economy.
Tshepo Moloi
He is the CEO of StokFella, a social FinTech company that provides financial products & services to stokvels to help them achieve inclusive growth. The company believes that through shared ownership and community capital, stokvels have the ability to build small businesses, pay for education and help South African’s achieve financial freedom.
Tobie van Zyl
Tobie van Zyl is the CEO & Founder of Bettr.App. Bettr is Africa’s next-generation digital banking platform built for the internet of money. The company’s vision is to connect people to the financial graph by empowering them with technology and tools to improve the way they bank, save, borrow and insure with an eco-system of on-demand, digital financial products and services.
