Johannesburg set the stage for the latest Issuer Academy Masterclass, bringing together fintech leaders, banks, issuers and ecosystem partners to tackle a central question, how do you build card programmes that truly scale in South Africa?
Across the day, speakers explored profitability, resilience, tokenization, credit innovation and ecosystem design, not as isolated themes, but as interconnected components of modern issuing. What emerged was a clear through-line that sustainable scale is intentional.
Leda Glyptis (Author, Advisor & Chair of Born AI) opened with a powerful reframing of the competitive market, drawing on global shifts she has observed over the past decade, from markets where cards once struggled for relevance to regions now leading growth in digital wallet adoption.
Ten years ago, in parts of the GCC, consumers defaulted to cash. Today, those same markets are among the fastest growing for card and wallet usage. What has changed? Infrastructure investment, regulatory convergence, changing attitudes toward credit and an acceleration in contactless behaviour post-COVID.
In a commoditised environment, the hardest decisions are not about what you can build, they’re about what you choose to prioritise. There are no prizes for being first and no rewards for copying quickly if your infrastructure, governance or cost base can’t execute at speed.
Leda also spotlighted the rise of agentic commerce. With research showing that in some markets, consumers were willing to let AI assistants research purchases, with 6% of adults in the UK being comfortable allowing transactions to be completed via those agents, the distribution layer is moving. If consumers begin “shopping through AI,” issuers are no longer just competing for consumer attention; they are competing to be the default instrument selected by the agent.
In that world, trust, tokenization, fraud management and liability clarity become strategic, not operational, concerns.
Building on that commercial lens, Anna Porra (Chief Revenue Officer, Paymentology) moved the conversation into the financial engine room of card programmes.
Drawing on more than 15 years of experience across consumer and commercial card portfolios, Anna highlighted the complexity behind what appears simple. Interchange regulation, scheme rules, fraud losses, settlement mechanics, funding costs, decline rates and value-added services all directly affect EBITDA.
Digital wallet enablement (Apple Pay, Google Pay and others) can drive adoption and utilisation. But they also introduce new cost layers that must be built into the business case from day one. Similarly, marginal improvements in approval rates or decline reduction can materially change profitability outcomes.
The session reinforced some critical principles, scale without unit economics discipline simply magnifies leakage, while more cards do not automatically mean more value if utilisation and behaviour are not aligned with the intended proposition. Equally, the indirect value generated from card-linked insights, from cross-sell opportunities to lifecycle visibility and retention, can be just as important as direct revenue lines.
Anna’s central takeaway resonated strongly, investors fund credible paths to profitability, not growth narratives alone.
A fireside conversation between Brentin Govender (Client Service Director, Paymentology) and Kesheni Moodley (Regional Director for Africa, Paymentology) reframed “next-generation” payments in the African context.
Africa’s digital economy is projected to grow significantly by 2030, with trillions in potential value at stake, yet behaviour does not shift automatically with infrastructure.
Kesheni highlighted a fundamental difference that in many African markets, payments must be built for resilience, irregular income, informal trade, high-frequency low-value transactions and mobile-first behaviour.
In mature economies, a failed payment is inconvenient. In parts of Africa, it can mean lost income for the day.
This means designing for immediacy that rivals cash, ensuring pricing is predictable and transparent even on low-value transactions, enabling interoperability across multiple apps and rails, and embedding trust directly into the payment flow rather than treating it as a post-transaction afterthought.
Africa already represents a dominant share of global mobile money usage. The opportunity is not theoretical as it is evident that consumers are shaping expectations now.
Innovation took centre stage with Nacho Gironella (Head of Sales Europe, Paymentology) and Matthias Horvath (Sales Solution Engineer Europe, Paymentology), who simplified tokenization through a powerful analogy, it’s like electricity, it works best when it disappears into the background.
Tokenization replaces sensitive card credentials with dynamic tokens, significantly reducing fraud exposure and PCI scope while enabling instant digital wallet provisioning.
The result? Improved security, smoother customer experiences therefore trust increases and this typically correlates to increased transaction volume.
But the strategic insight ran deeper, tokenization also acts as a relationship layer. It enables:
In markets where digital wallet adoption is accelerating, tokenization becomes a foundational capability.
The session focused on credit innovation, with Matthias introducing a modern credit infrastructure approach, emphasizing that debit enables transactions and credit enables growth.
In South Africa, demand for accessible, flexible credit remains strong, particularly among underserved consumers and SMEs. Yet legacy systems often constrain innovation with rigid architectures, slow product iteration and operational overhead.
Built as a cloud-native, real-time credit ledger, PayCredit enables institutions to become builders of credit products rather than operators of fragile infrastructure, supporting faster time to market, real-time balance and risk visibility, configurable interest and instalment structures, automated statements, delinquency workflows and modern propositions such as BNPL-style extensions, all shaped around customer needs rather than legacy constraints.
Modern credit platforms turn compliance, reporting and servicing from friction points into enablers of scalable growth.
Darren Franks (Co-Founder, FINASA - Fintech Association of South Africa) challenged the room with a though-provoking statement.
South Africa has world-class payment rails with strong card adoption and global-level talent, yet cash remains dominant in many everyday use cases.
Infrastructure alone does not change behaviour. Value does.
For many consumers, cash offers immediacy, safety perception and zero visible cost. Digital solutions must compete not only on technical capability but on:
Darren also highlighted emerging themes from stablecoin growth globally to regulatory grey areas in BNPL, reinforcing that innovation must happen in collaboration with regulators rather than in avoidance of them.
The real competitor is not the fintech next door, it is entrenched habit.
The practical realities of execution were brought to life by Pauline Molloyi (Chief Product & Innovation Officer, OM Bank).
Building a bank in South Africa involves extensive regulatory engagement, multi-stage licensing, interoperability requirements across payment rails and careful sequencing of product capability.
OM Bank’s rollout demonstrated measurable traction, including onboarding thousands of customers per day and exceeding early targets, while balancing digital-first journeys with trust signals such as physical presence and transparent pricing.
Pauline’s philosophy is that the experience is the product.
The approach centred on transparent, understandable pricing, removing friction where it matters most, particularly in low-value, high-frequency flows while delivering responsible credit in a financially stressed market and designing behavioural nudges that respect human decision-making rather than attempting to control it.
Execution in the real world is rarely linear but disciplined ecosystem design enables resilience.
The Masterclass closed with Merusha Naidu (Global Head of Partnerships, Paymentology) reinforcing the structural lesson of the day.
Owning everything does not guarantee flexibility or cost efficiency. In many cases, it creates operational drag. Interestingly, the organisations that scale fastest focus on differentiation and partner intentionally for the rest.
Merusha then introduced a practical framework for ecosystem design. Number one is purpose. Purpose begins with a clear problem definition and alignment around what the ecosystem is solving better together than apart. Framework two is platform. Platform provides the secure, cloud-first and API-driven foundation that removes friction and enables innovation at speed. Number three is partnership. Partnerships bring complementary expertise and shared incentives, ensuring that each player focuses on what they do best. Lastly, performance. Performance is the measurable impact created across the ecosystem not just individual success, but shared outcomes in speed, reliability and growth.
From schemes and sponsor banks to fraud providers, tokenization services, KYC partners and cloud infrastructure, no transaction happens in isolation.
Partnerships are not optional, they are the operating model.
The Issuer Academy South Africa reinforced a defining truth, the future of card issuing will not be won by those who build the most, but by those who build intentionally.