South Africa's cash economy costs the country around 30 billion rand annually, a figure Israel Skosana, Chief Product and Scheme Officer at PayInc, uses to frame the scale of what digitizing payments is actually meant to solve. Skosana made the observation during a conversation with Junaid Dadan, President and Co-Founder of Stitch, a South African open banking and payment infrastructure company, on the season one finale of the Between the Seams podcast.
PayInc is the rebranded successor to Bankserv, which operated as South Africa's national payments utility serving commercial banks. The South African Reserve Bank now holds 50 percent of the business, with commercial banks splitting the remainder. Skosana described the structure as "an ideal public-private partnership" and said the shift reflects a broader change in the organization's mandate. Where Bankserv served banks exclusively, PayInc now positions itself as the infrastructure layer beneath fintechs, mobile network operators and large retailers as well. "Payments are not reserved just for banks," Skosana said. "Payments are available to all that meet the criteria to be sound payment service providers."
Skosana has spent more than twenty years in payments, beginning as a developer at one of South Africa's major commercial banks before moving through card systems and into national infrastructure. That path put him at the center of milestones including the rollout of EMV cards and the arrival of Apple Pay and Google Pay tokenization in South Africa.
PayShap, PayInc's real-time payments rail, settles transactions in around ten seconds. Skosana described card infrastructure and PayShap as serving different contexts rather than competing with each other: cards remain dominant in urban formal retail, while PayShap's near-instant settlement gives merchants certainty over working capital that card settlement timelines do not always provide. He raised the possibility of local card schemes, pointing to Verve's position in Nigeria as a model the South African market could examine, and said PayInc holds "no holy cows" when reassessing its current approach.
QR code standardization came up as a prerequisite for expanding digital payments beyond the card-holding population. South Africa currently has multiple competing QR formats, and PayInc is working to bring a uniform specification across the ecosystem. Every adult in South Africa has a mobile phone, Skosana noted, but not every adult holds a card product. A standardized QR initiation method allows anyone to pay digitally at a point of sale without cash or a card, which is the population segment card infrastructure has never fully reached.
Recurring and variable payment functionality on Request to Pay sits on PayInc's product roadmap. Skosana confirmed this in response to a question about merchant demand Dadan said Stitch hears from its clients, describing a prioritization exercise to determine which use cases, from subscriptions to on-demand services, deliver the broadest value first. He said PayInc is drawing lessons from how Brazil, India and Turkey have built out similar capabilities.
Fraud prevention, Skosana argued, needs to be embedded into payment message design rather than treated as a layer applied after the fact. PayInc is incorporating identity information, historical fraud patterns and mule account data directly into the messaging infrastructure so that authorization decisions improve over time as the data set grows. He was direct about the risk AI introduces on both sides: the same tools that strengthen fraud detection are available to bad actors, which makes scheme governance and participant vetting more consequential, not less.
Looking to 2030, Skosana predicted that users will simply want to pay or receive money without knowing which rail carries the transaction, and that PayInc's job is to make card, PayShap and emerging methods operate as a unified experience underneath. For a spaza shop owner moving from cash to digital transactions, he said, the practical outcome goes beyond faster payments: a transaction record creates the data trail that can make credit accessible for the first time.
