In a remarkable stride forward for the payments and remittances landscape of southern Africa, PayInc, is embarking on a transformative partnership with Kuva - a resurgent fintech company that builds payments and remittance infrastructure for banks and the financial services sector in Zimbabwe and frontier markets.
Senior representatives from PayInc were in Harare recently and held meetings with Kuva following a technical operator agreement they signed in early February.
The agreement positions Kuva as a technical operating partner to PayIncs cross-border payments and clearing platform called transactions cleared on an immediate basis (TCIB).
The scope of the agreement covers all 16 Sadc countries and technical integrations are well underway.
Formerly known as BankserveAfrica, PayInc is Africa’s leading automated clearing house (ACH) – the transactional link between many major payment institutions.
From its two replicating processing sites in Johannesburg, their advanced payment systems allow for seamless interbank switching, clearing and settlement.
In South Africa, PayInc is the banking sector’s long-time trusted clearing partner and official payment system operator (PSO), as authorised by the Payments Association of South Africa.
They have been ensuring increased interoperability between banks in South Africa for decades, reducing risk and producing world-first innovations such as SASWITCH along the way.
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More recently, they have been facilitating increasing interoperability on a regional, cross-country level for banks and non-banks.
PayIncs Portfolio manager Africa and Swift, Cookie Guy-Rene Mbuya was impressed with Kuva’s payment infrastructure and customer base, which includes CBZ Bank and recently Innbucks Bank.
He expressed that the global trend of banking payment services and infrastructure is shifting from Banks to FinTech’s.
“Based on directives from the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) and other Common Monetary Area (CMA) central banks, all Payment Service Providers (PSPs) operating in the CMA are required to finalise the migration of low-value cross-border EFTs to approved regional low-value payment systems, such as TCIB by March 31, 2027.”
This is just one example of such a shift, which is both demand driven - for faster, simpler payment processing - and now supported by legislation from the South African Reserve Bank.
“We will support Kuva as they extend our technical services for TCIB to Zimbabwe and the Sadc region,” said Cookie.
Platforms such as TCIB are open to all banks and non-banking financial services providers, who hold licenses for processing cross-border payments.
Companies like Kuva provide the easiest route to access such payment gateways through their infrastructure which is built for such regional scalability, tailored to the local financial service customer and integrated with the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe for real-time compliance reporting.
This enables financial service providers to easily access new markets for remittances and payments without the complexity of intermediary banks, exploitative agent models and regulatory reporting.
The financial service providers can focus on the metrics that really matter.
