IN PARTNERSHIP WITH:
INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT // EDITION 1
Expanding Access:
The Next Phase of Digital Finance
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We built the future of finance. We just forgot to invite most South Africans.
Reading time: 25 mins
17 June 2026
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
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South Africa’s fintech sector has had a remarkable decade. It has built new banks, launched new payment rails, digitised products and attracted serious investment. Measured by the industry’s usual yardsticks like products launched, customers acquired, transactions processed, capital raised, it has plainly succeeded.
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But those yardsticks don’t answer the question that matters most: are more South Africans actually participating in the economy? A new payment rail only counts for something if people use it. A digital bank only counts if it widens access. Innovation, on its own, is not impact.
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That tension runs through every conversation in this first edition of FINASA Industry Spotlight. Jeff Parker of Paymentology argues that infrastructure decides whether innovation can scale at all. Cheslyn Jacobs of GoTyme Bank believes the industry should spend less energy defending market share and more growing participation. And ePocket founders Mpho Tlhape and Karabo Seduma question whether township economies ever needed “fixing” in the first place.
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Three very different vantage points, and yet they land in much the same place: innovation and inclusion are not the same thing. Innovation can exist without inclusion. Inclusion cannot exist without participation, and participation cannot exist without trust.
South Africa is not short of innovation. It remains one of the continent’s most dynamic fintech markets. The harder question is whether that innovation is reaching informal merchants, township economies, small businesses, and the millions of people still operating at the edges of the formal financial system. The next phase of digital finance will be judged less by what gets built, and more by who gets brought along.​
MEET THE CONTRIBUTORS
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CONTRIBUTORS
JEFF PARKER
CEO,
Paymentology
CHESLYN JACOBS
CEO,
GoTyme Bank
MPHO THLAPE
Founder & CEO,
ePocket
KARABO SEDUMA
Co-Founder & COO,
ePocket
JEFF PARKER
CEO, Paymentology
Jeff Parker is CEO of Paymentology, a global issuer processor supporting banks and fintechs across more than 65 countries. He is responsible for the company’s strategy and overall direction, leading the business as it scales its global issuing platform to over 400 clients worldwide.
Jeff brings more than two decades of experience in financial services and fintech, having built and scaled businesses across multiple markets and regulatory environments. Prior to Paymentology, he was CEO of WorldFirst, the international payments business acquired by Ant Group, where he led its global expansion and commercial development.
He has also held senior leadership roles at Marqeta as SVP and Managing Director, as well as at Macquarie Bank and OFX. Across his career, Jeff has focused on building commercially disciplined, operationally resilient businesses that scale effectively across international markets.
CHESLYN JACOBS
CEO, GoTyme Bank
Cheslyn Jacobs is Chief Executive Officer of GoTyme Bank and a member of the founding team that helped build one of South Africa's fastest-growing digital banks. Having joined the broader Tyme Group in 2012, he has held leadership roles across sales, operations and commercial strategy, playing a key role in the bank's growth journey.
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Prior to becoming CEO in 2026, Cheslyn served as Chief Commercial Officer, where he was responsible for customer growth, revenue generation and strategic partnerships. Today, he leads GoTyme Bank's continued focus on innovation, customer experience and expanding access to financial services for South Africans.
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Passionate about long-term growth and financial inclusion, Cheslyn believes the future of banking lies not only in better technology, but in creating products and experiences that enable more people to participate meaningfully in the economy.
MPHO THLAPE
CEO & Founder, ePocket
Mpho is a visionary South African fintech entrepreneur dedicated to redefining grassroots financial access. As the driving force behind ePocket, Mpho combines deep technical infrastructure expertise with a passion for community-led economic development, focused on removing the friction of cash from township and rural enterprises.
KARABO SEDUMA
COO & Co-Founder, ePocket
Karabo is a dynamic fintech leader and co-founder of ePocket. Passionate about financial inclusion and real-world technology adoption, Karabo focuses on strategic growth, community partnership ecosystems, and championing digital payment access for small businesses across South Africa's informal economies.
PAYMENTOLOGY
South Africa’s Payment Rails Are World-Class. So Why Is Cash Still King?
The fintech sector has spent a decade obsessing over customer experience. But beneath every successful product sits an invisible layer that decides whether innovation can scale and whether millions of South Africans can ever reach it.
In conversation with Jeff Parker, CEO of Paymentology
Ask most people what drives financial inclusion and they’ll point to the customer-facing layer: the app, the onboarding journey, the product itself. Jeff Parker sees it differently. For him, the most important part of any financial experience is the part the customer never sees.
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Every digital bank and payment app a South African consumer touches sits on top of infrastructure that processes transactions in real time, supports compliance, integrates new payment rails, and dictates how quickly an institution can respond when the market shifts. When that layer is modern and adaptable, institutions can move fast, launch new products, pivot when regulation changes, scale without rebuilding from scratch. When it is rigid, everything above it is constrained, no matter how polished the interface.
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Parker’s argument is direct: in a market where consumer-facing features are rapidly commoditising, infrastructure has quietly become the real source of competitive advantage. A strategic asset, not just an operational necessity. For fintechs looking to grow, the challenge is no longer just building a great product. It is making sure the foundations underneath can keep up.
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INNOVATION HAS OUTPACED PARTICIPATION
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South Africa now has digital-first banks growing steadily, new payment experiences arriving constantly, and more consumer choice than at any point in its financial history. Yet walk into many communities and cash is still how business gets done. The industry has become exceptionally good at creating products; it has been far less good at getting them to the people who need them most. Success, Parker argues, should be measured less by how many new solutions enter the market and more by how many people enter the financial system.​
WHY LOCALISATION IS NOT OPTIONAL
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Financial services are often discussed through a global lens. The products, the frameworks, the investor narratives all travel well across borders. Inclusion does not. Consumer behaviour is local. Regulation is local. Trust is local. A solution that scales beautifully in one market cannot simply be transplanted and expected to perform.
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For South Africa, that cuts both ways. The risk is importing frameworks that were never designed for local realities. The opportunity is building products around South African payment behaviours, informal economy dynamics and inclusion challenges. These are products that no international competitor can just replicate by adjusting a currency symbol.
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THE WORD NOBODY WANTS TO SAY: RESILIENCE
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The sector pours enormous energy into what comes next. AI, digital assets, embedded finance, real-time payments. They spend far less time looking into whether systems stay up. But consumers only trust digital finance when it works, and businesses only depend on digital payments when they are consistently available. A single high-profile failure can set adoption back years in communities where trust in formal finance was already fragile. As participation grows, resilience may become one of the most important enablers of inclusion. It remains one of the least discussed.
THE REAL CHALLENGE
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South Africa’s problem, in Parker’s telling, is not innovation but adoption. The institutions, the fintechs and the rails all exist; millions of consumers and small businesses still rely on cash anyway. The answer is not simply more products. It is infrastructure that can evolve, partnerships that can scale, and solutions designed around local realities.
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"Customers see the app, the card or the digital experience, but infrastructure determines whether that experience can reach millions of people reliably, securely and affordably."
Jeff Parker, CEO, Paymentology
“The infrastructure has to be global enough to provide consistency, but local enough to meet the needs of each market.”
Jeff Parker, CEO, Paymentology
“The question shouldn’t just be how we build the next generation of financial products. It should be how we ensure more people and businesses can benefit from them.”
Jeff Parker, CEO, Paymentology
GOTYME BANK
Add Another Zero: The Growth Mindset Behind One of South Africa’s Fastest-Growing Banks
When every institution has an app and digital features become commodities, what creates lasting advantage? GoTyme Bank thinks it has the answer, and it starts with a ten-year-old who doesn’t have a bank account yet.
In conversation with Cheslyn Jacobs, CEO of GoTyme Bank
Throughout our conversation, Cheslyn Jacobs kept returning to one idea: the ten-year-old who will choose their first bank six years from now. Most businesses fight over today’s customer. GoTyme spends an unusual amount of time thinking about tomorrow’s and that habit explains a great deal about how the bank operates.​
ADD ANOTHER ZERO
Inside GoTyme there is a phrase repeated often enough to have become culture:
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​On the surface it’s a growth target. In practice it works as a forcing function. It’s a standing challenge to ask, at every stage, what would have to change for the business to be ten times its current size. The answer is rarely “more of the same.” Growing by an order of magnitude means revisiting the platform, the operating model, the customer experience, even the assumptions behind past success.
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It also explains why GoTyme undertook a major platform migration only a few years into its existence, a move most organisations would call premature. The objective was not to fix what was broken, but to make sure what was working didn’t become a ceiling. There’s a lesson in that for the wider industry: in fast-moving markets, the bigger risk is rarely moving too quickly. It’s getting comfortable with what already works.
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WHEN FEATURES BECOME COMMMODITIES
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Banking is commoditising. That is Jacobs’ blunt assessment, and it’s worth sitting with. The features that defined digital banking’s first wave, mobile apps, virtual cards, real-time account opening, instant payments, are now table stakes. Every serious player has them, and nobody chooses a bank because it has an app.
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Which is why “Banking Made Beautiful” is less a branding exercise than a strategic bet: features eventually get copied, while experiences are hard to replicate. As the technology itself levels out, the battleground shifts to how it is deployed. Does it remove friction, solve real customer problems, and create something that feels intuitive and genuinely valuable?​
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GROWING THE PIE, NOT THE SLICE
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Where most institutions see competition as a fight over market share, as in “how do we take customers from the bank across the street?”, GoTyme asks a different question: how do we expand the market itself? The logic is straightforward. When barriers to participation fall, more people transact digitally; when more people transact digitally, economic activity grows; and a growing market benefits everyone in it.
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Jacobs points to Brazil’s PIX system as proof of what that looks like at scale, a payments network that shifted economic participation in ways that go far beyond any single institution’s share.
For GoTyme, the prize isn’t a larger slice of existing transactions. It’s creating new ones.
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THE BEST FORM OF DEFENCE
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On new banking entrants, Jacobs is unequivocal: more competition should be welcomed. It forces institutions to improve the value they deliver, punishes complacency and benefits consumers. A new player choosing South Africa is not a threat, it’s a signal that this market is worth investing in.
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It’s a posture rooted in how Jacobs views challenges generally. Where many leaders talk about what keeps them up at night, he flips the framing entirely:
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In a market where many institutions are busy protecting what they have, GoTyme appears focused on building what comes next.​
THE SME FRONTIER
Consumer banking has seen a decade of innovation; small business banking has not kept pace. South Africa’s SMEs are widely recognised as a critical engine of growth and job creation, yet regulatory complexity, onboarding friction and competing priorities inside financial institutions have left the segment underserved. GoTyme acknowledges this openly. The opportunity is visible; capturing it is harder.
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But the institutions that genuinely simplify access for South African SMEs by reducing friction and designing around how these businesses actually operate will have found one of the sector’s largest untapped growth opportunities.
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WHAT THIS ACTUALLY MEANS
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Products, features and pricing can all be copied by anyone with sufficient capital. What cannot be easily copied is the experience a customer has, the trust an institution builds over time, and the philosophy that shapes its decisions.
And GoTyme’s philosophy fits in four words: keep adding another zero.
“Our job is simple. Add another zero.”
Cheslyn Jacobs, CEO, GoTyme Bank
“The best form of defense, is attack.”
Cheslyn Jacobs, CEO, GoTyme Bank
“All these fascinating things, all these challenges, those are the things that wake me up in the morning. They don’t keep me awake at night. They wake me up in the morning because then you get excited about it. We’ve got to take this challenge on. We’ve got to overcome it.”
Cheslyn Jacobs, CEO, GoTyme Bank
ePOCKET
The Fintech Industry Has Been Solving the Wrong Problem in Township Economies
For decades, the formal financial sector has described informal markets as underserved and underdeveloped. ePocket argues the opposite and the distinction could reshape how South Africa approaches financial inclusion entirely.
In conversation with Mpho Tlhape, Founder & CEO, and Karabo Seduma, Co-Founder & COO of ePocket
Spend time in a township economy and one thing becomes obvious very quickly: people are already participating. They’re trading, saving and building businesses. The real question was never whether economic activity exists, it’s whether financial services have adapted to how these communities actually operate. ePocket’s contention is that, for the most part, they haven’t.
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Despite years of innovation, cash remains dominant in precisely the communities that inclusion strategies are designed to serve, and products that perform well in formal contexts routinely stall in informal ones.
ePocket’s explanation is not a lack of innovation but a design failure: the industry has built financial services and expected communities to adapt to them, rather than building services that adapt to communities.
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INFORMAL COMMERCE IS NOT INFORMAL THINKING
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The vocabulary gives the game away. Words like “underserved,” “underdeveloped” and “behind” carry an embedded assumption: that these communities are missing something the formal economy has, and that inclusion means handing it to them. ePocket rejects that framing.
Township economies are commercial ecosystems built on trusted networks, established trading behaviours and deeply embedded community relationships that are sophisticated, and resilient in ways formal structures often are not. Design without understanding them, and you get products that are technically functional but contextually foreign. Which is to say, unused.
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WHY CASH KEEPS WINNING
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The industry has long assumed that digital payments would naturally displace cash as technology improved and costs fell. That assumption keeps failing for a simple reason: cash works. It is immediate and universally understood. It needs no data connection, no smartphone, no account, and no trust in an institution the user may have no reason to trust. Once device costs, data costs, fees and time are all counted, it is often still the cheaper option.
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Consumers don’t compare digital payments with other digital products; they compare them with cash. Inclusion doesn’t happen when digital payments become available. It happens when they become easier than cash, which is a far higher bar.
And it’s one the industry has not always been honest about how far it remains from clearing
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THE MERCHANT IS THE MISSING PIECE
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Here is the insight most inclusion strategies miss: the most important customer is not the consumer, it’s the merchant. Consumers can only go digital when the businesses they buy from accept digital payments and only leave cash behind when merchants give them a reason to.
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Yet the industry has poured investment into consumer-facing products and marketing while paying far less attention to merchant enablement. ePocket’s view is that this is precisely backwards. Get the merchant on board, and consumer behaviour follows.
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THE MISSING HUMAN LAYER
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Technology is only part of the adoption equation. The harder part is human.
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The most sophisticated payment platform in the world has limited value if a merchant feels uncomfortable using it on a busy trading day, if a customer isn’t sure a transaction went through, or if nobody in the community has yet visibly used it and found it trustworthy.
The work that actually drives adoption like onboarding, training, support, local-language accessibility, community engagement is unglamorous. It scales awkwardly and is hard to present to investors as innovation. It may also be among the most important work in the entire inclusion agenda.
DIGITISING COMMUNITY FINANCE, NOT REPLACING IT
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Perhaps the most striking idea from ePocket concerns the products themselves. South Africa has structures for community finance that predate formal banking and have persisted because they work: stokvels, savings circles, collective purchasing initiatives, neighbourhood financial networks. They run on exactly the trust and social accountability that formal institutions spend decades trying to build.
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The industry’s instinct has been to treat these as stopgaps, things people use until “real banking” arrives. ePocket reads them differently: not obstacles to inclusion, but the architecture of it. A stokvel built on digital infrastructure. A savings circle with mobile payments. Community purchasing power connected to formal supply chains.
That is a genuinely different vision of what financial inclusion could look like in South Africa.
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WHAT ePOCKET GETS RIGHT
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ePocket’s case, in the end, is that financial inclusion is a human challenge before it is a technological one. Technology can enable trust; communities create it. If Paymentology’s lens is infrastructure and GoTyme’s is purpose, ePocket’s is fit: participation only happens when financial services slot naturally into people’s lives.
The future of digital finance in South Africa will belong not to whoever builds the most advanced technology, but to whoever best understands the communities they are trying to serve.
“Township commerce isn’t underdeveloped. It’s highly active, vibrant and resilient.”
The ePocket team
“When a cash transaction costs R0 to hand over, but a digital transaction penalises a merchant or user with unexpected banking charges, cash wins every time.”
The ePocket team
“If the informal merchant doesn’t accept digital payments, the consumer will continue to withdraw cash from the ATM and bring it back to the community.”
The ePocket team
“The industry overlooks the boots-on-the-ground onboarding, local language nuances, and the critical need for hyper-local customer support.”
The ePocket team
INDUSTRY REFLECTION
Access Was Never the Goal. Here’s What We Got Wrong About Financial Inclusion.
When we began these conversations, we expected three very different perspectives on digital finance. We got them and yet the same themes kept resurfacing. Jeff Parker spoke about the infrastructure required to scale participation. Cheslyn Jacobs spoke about growing the market rather than fighting over market share. Mpho Tlhape and Karabo Seduma of ePocket challenged our assumptions about what inclusion actually looks like on the ground.
Final thoughts from the FinTech Association of South Africa
Infrastructure matters because innovation cannot scale without it. Purpose matters because growth should expand opportunity rather than simply redistribute market share. And context, the least glamorous of the three, may matter most of all, because people only adopt what fits their lives. None of these alone creates inclusion, but together they sketch a blueprint for the next phase of digital finance in South Africa.
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It’s worth being honest in both directions. The industry’s achievements are real: accounts open faster than ever, payments move in real time, digital banking is mainstream, and financial services are more accessible than at any point in the country’s history. And still, millions of South Africans operate at the edges of the formal system. Cash dominates in many communities. Small businesses face persistent barriers. Adoption in informal economies keeps running behind the forecasts.
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What struck us most was how often every conversation circled back to a single word: participation. Not access, not products, not technology but the ability of more South Africans to meaningfully take part in the economy.
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For years, inclusion has been measured through access. How many people have bank accounts? How many can reach digital payments? These are important indicators, but they are not sufficient ones. Access tells us whether someone can use a financial service; it tells us nothing about whether they do.
A merchant may have access to digital payments and still prefer cash. A consumer may hold a bank account and rarely touch it. Access is the beginning of the journey. Participation is the outcome. The industry has spent a decade building the first; the next decade belongs to the second.
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INCLUSION IS A SHARED RESPONSIBILITY
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There is also a structural problem: fragmentation.
Infrastructure providers build the rails, banks build the products, fintechs build the experiences, regulators set the frameworks and yet too rarely do all of them align around a shared definition of success. If any one link fails, inclusion stalls.
The next phase will require a different model, one where infrastructure providers, banks, fintechs, regulators and community organisations work toward measurable outcomes rather than individual products or institutional metrics.
The question stops being “who owns the customer?” and becomes “how do we expand economic participation?”
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THE HUMAN QUESTION
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Technology can create access. Whether it gets used is decided elsewhere: by people who must trust it, communities that must adopt it, and merchants who must find real value in it.
The future of digital finance depends less on the sophistication of the technology than on how well it aligns with the needs, behaviours and realities of the people it is meant to serve. That requires a different lens, one less interested in whether a solution can be built and more in whether it will be used, less in whether a product is innovative and more in whether it removes a barrier.
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WHAT A TRULY INCLUSIVE ECONOMY LOOKS LIKE
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A truly inclusive financial economy is not one where every person simply has a bank account, or where every transaction is digital. It is one where a person’s ability to participate in the economy is no longer constrained by their ability to access financial services.
Where entrepreneurs can grow regardless of geography, small businesses can join the formal economy without excessive friction, money moves safely, affordably and instantly, and opportunity is not determined by where someone lives, who they know, or how much they already have.
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South Africa’s fintech ecosystem has proven it can innovate. The harder task is making that innovation count beyond those who already participate in the formal economy. The country does not need more financial products for the sake of having them; it needs more people participating in the economy because those products exist.
That is the difference between access and inclusion and it is the difference that will define the next chapter of digital finance in South Africa.
The open question is whether the industry is prepared to measure success differently.
Based on these conversations, it is already starting to ask.
JOIN THE CONVERSATION
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The FINASA Industry Spotlight is designed to surface the ideas, challenges and opportunities shaping South Africa’s fintech ecosystem. Future editions will feature new voices from across the industry, alongside focused roundtable discussions with members, partners and ecosystem leaders.
FEATURED IN THIS EDITION
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PAYMENTOLOGY
Paymentology is a global issuer processor giving fintechs, digital banks and retail banks the technology, expertise and flexibility to launch, manage and scale a broad variety of card programmes around the world.
Built on Lume, the platform for growth, Paymentology processes billions of transactions on behalf of customers globally, across 65+ countries and 14 time zones.
With over 20 years of dedicated on-soil processing and strategic investment across Africa, and more than 500 payments experts bringing deep local market knowledge to every engagement, Paymentology combines global reach with regional expertise, helping clients build momentum, enter new markets and unlock unstoppable growth.
Today, Paymentology supports clients in close to 70 countries, including leading fintechs such as M-Pesa by Safaricom, RedotPay, Rain, TrueMoney and ARQ, as well as some of the world's fastest-growing neobanks, including GoTyme, Snappi, Wio Bank, D360 Bank and Albo.
ePocket
ePocket is a home-grown South African digital wallet and payment gateway solution specifically engineered to drive financial inclusion and power township commerce. Built to bridge the gap between formal financial infrastructure and informal economies, ePocket enables seamless, affordable, and highly secure digital transactions for informal merchants, community schools, and everyday consumers in underserved regions. By focusing on hyper-local ecosystems, ePocket is turning cash-dominated communities into thriving digital payment hubs.
GOTYME BANK
GoTyme Bank is one of South Africa's leading digital banks, focused on making banking more accessible, rewarding and customer-centric. Since launching in 2019, the bank has grown to serve more than 12 million customers through a combination of innovative digital banking solutions, transparent pricing and a strong focus on customer experience.
As part of the global Tyme Group, GoTyme Bank is helping redefine what modern banking can look like, with a mission to empower more people to participate meaningfully in the financial economy.
The bank continues to challenge traditional banking models by combining digital innovation with practical, everyday financial solutions. Through a focus on simplicity, accessibility and long-term customer value, GoTyme is building a banking experience designed around the needs of modern South Africans.
FINASA
FINASA is the industry association for South Africa's fintech ecosystem, bringing together fintechs, regulators, banks, investors and ecosystem partners to support responsible innovation, influence policy and accelerate financial inclusion.
Through working groups, industry engagement, research, events and thought leadership initiatives, FINASA helps shape the future of financial services in South Africa while creating opportunities for collaboration and provides a platform for industry dialogue, helping stakeholders address shared challenges and support fintech growth.
By connecting diverse voices across the ecosystem, FINASA helps foster collaboration, knowledge sharing and industry alignment. It also works to ensure that fintech innovation contributes meaningfully to economic participation and financial inclusion across South Africa.
