Payments, people and strategy are key to opening up new ways of transacting in South Africa
South Africa’s payment ecosystem is a tangle of legacy banks, fintechs, telcos and card schemes, all jostling for a slice of the transaction pie. It’s a space where smart and ingenious capture customer attention, and where people need to sit at the heart of every transaction. For Ntombenhle ‘Enhle’ Mposula, it comes down to creating an architecture of trust in economies that were never designed to be included.
For nearly two decades, Mposula has been working her way through the South African payments value chain, solving for sectors that have been consistently perceived as too complicated, but that need digitisation and financial inclusion to thrive. She’s worked in banks, telcos, fintechs and with global card schemes, and across the systems most consumers never see, and is using these insights to ask the difficult questions.
Where is the real friction in payments? Whose experiences still don’t count? What should trust look like in a digital economy built on exclusion?
“People think payments are about speed, but they’re not. They’re about visibility,” she says. “The small salon owner in Thembisa having the tools she needs to prove her income. A clinic in Umlazi being able to receive digital payments so they don’t have to turn patients away for cash. This is what payment solutions in South Africa have to solve for.”
From an FNB call centre to a pan-African strategy
Mposula was two years into her LLB when she took a learnership at FNB in the SpeedPoint division, the unglamorous, customer-facing frontline of card payments. It taught her everything from the ground up – how the machines work, how merchants think, and what failure feels like. This immersion was to become her playbook.
Studying relentlessly, Mposula collected a diploma, certifications and a BSc in digital technology. She then deliberately crossed boundaries from banking to telecoms to global payments, each move intentional.
“I was mapping the system. I needed to understand how value moves, how it breaks and how to fix it,” she says.
At MasterCard, she led payment acceptance across 10 Southern African countries, embedding digital acceptance in places where cash was a necessity. At Vodacom, she helped take in-store payment solutions to market, and at Blue Label, she oversaw the integration of card functionality into value-added services. Each role deepened her perspective, leading her full circle to the acquisitions space, but this time at the intersection of omnichannel commerce and consumer experience.
Now working at Ecentric, Mposula is focusing on building infrastructure for merchants. From tier one retailers through to street level traders, she’s creating solutions that allow them to accept trustworthy, auditable, future-fit payments. Payshap, BNPL, biometric and QR-based flows are all part of the process, and for her, the choice of solution comes down to how relevant it is for the customer.
“Alternative payment methods are a response to how consumers in various markets prefer to pay, so if they don’t work seamlessly, they fail,” she says.,
She’s also vocal about the invisible obstacles in the system: fragmented integrations, duplicated onboarding processes, technology built for urban elites. What she’s building is a payments fabric that reflects the complexity of African markets without compromising on performance.
Building beyond inclusion
Financial inclusion is not a KPI, says Mposula. “Inclusion isn’t the ceiling, it’s the floor. Real equity is when someone can participate, choosing how to pay, prove their earnings, grow their business, apply for credit, and sell across borders,” she says.
She’s enabling this through product decisions designed to give SMEs and underserved communities the same dignity and tools as enterprise merchants. “We talk a lot about scale, but scale without context is extraction. If you’re not listening to the salon, the taxi boss or the roadside vendor, you’re not solving for Africa,” she continues.
“If you can’t accept a payment, you don’t exist in the economy,” she says. “And if the product is built without you in mind? You’re locked out before you even begin.”
As a member of Women in Payments, Mposula also thinks deeply about who gets to shape the future of payments and who doesn’t. The payment stack is a technical framework, yes, but should also be a proxy for policymaking. Her work is about who gets counted, who gets seen and how systems can evolve to effect real change.
The real frontier is integration. There are plenty of features, tools and capabilities in payments, but for Mposula, the big leap is about stitching payments into the real, messy, beautiful parts of life like public transport, community health, micro-retail, and even informal entertainment.
“Payment service providers winning in the next phase are those that build fast, integrate easily and centre the user,” she says. “A payment experience should feel native and fit into the spaces where data is sparse, but demand is high.”
