CashAfrica is building the infrastructure that allows payment businesses to offer contactless payments across Africa. Its focus is not simply on making payments faster, but on making tap-to-pay easy and trusted enough to become a habit.
Instead of handing over a card and waiting for a POS transaction, a customer could simply tap once and pay. Bello Opeyemi, Chief Technology Officer at CashAfrica, sees that experience extending beyond stores to markets, supermarkets, ATMs and even online payments.
For customers, the experience is the tap; CashAfrica provides the infrastructure behind it. But building that infrastructure is only part of the challenge. CashAfrica also has to solve a more basic problem: getting people to change how they pay.
Across Africa, people already have payment methods they trust: cash, bank transfers and cards. Introducing another option does not mean customers will automatically switch. For contactless to become an everyday habit, it has to be meaningfully easier.
Merchants are part of that process too. If customers try to tap and are repeatedly told that tap-to-pay is not working, they will return to what they already know. But when merchants encourage customers to tap because it is faster, the behaviour can begin to change.
Bello points to the role merchants played in making card payments visible at checkout and believes contactless payments need the same push. That is why CashAfrica’s approach starts with the customer rather than the technology.
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Building for the Problems Customers Actually Have
For Bello, the starting point is what problem customers actually have.
“I don’t start from ‘what’s trendy?’ I start from ‘what real customer problem are we solving for our market?’”
That question guides what CashAfrica builds. Every idea is tested against three criteria: customer impact, strategic fit and execution feasibility.
Customer impact asks whether the problem is meaningful at the scale of the African market, rather than imported from assumptions elsewhere. Strategic fit asks whether the idea supports CashAfrica’s role in the payments ecosystem. Execution feasibility asks whether the team can build and operate it with the speed, resilience and reliability its partners expect.
Once an idea passes those tests, the team ships small, gathers feedback, refines what works and quickly removes what does not.
That same thinking shapes what he sees as CashAfrica’s biggest engineering advantage. If he had to choose, it would be execution speed built on resilient infrastructure.
Reliability and security are non-negotiable: every tap needs to work, and every movement of money needs to be safe.
“A payment process is a promise,” Bello says. When CashAfrica tells a customer that their money will arrive and their details will remain safe, the company has to keep that promise at scale. Once that foundation is reliable, the team can move faster without compromising trust.
Why CashAfrica Became a Platform
That focus on reliability also led to a major change in how CashAfrica built its technology.
The company had previously been developing as a feature-heavy product, adding features, integrations and support flows to one product. Over time, that approach made the system more complex, slowed innovation and made it harder to work with partners.
CashAfrica responded by rethinking itself as a platform. The shift placed reliability, security and partner-friendly integrations at the centre of the technology, changing how CashAfrica designs, ships and scales new services.
That platform approach also reflects how Bello sees the wider payments ecosystem.
Payments already depend on a network of partners, with banks, switches, wallets and schemes each playing different roles. CashAfrica’s role is to provide infrastructure that allows these players to offer contactless experiences without rebuilding everything from scratch.
Banks bring distribution and regulatory strength; CashAfrica provides the infrastructure. For Bello, the long-term opportunity is collaboration: when ecosystem players can work together on stable rails, innovation and trust can move faster.
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Making Contactless the Easier Choice
For a company building infrastructure, success is often seen through what does not go wrong. Bello compares it to a good restaurant kitchen. If customers are talking about the plumbing, something has gone wrong.
CashAfrica therefore measures its work through transaction success, settlement accuracy, system availability, latency and how quickly it can detect and recover from problems. It also looks at whether it can release new products quickly without compromising reliability and security.
Ultimately, the goal is to get customers and partners to trust that payments will work and that their money and data will be safe.
That trust will matter as contactless payments develop across African markets. Bello expects the next five years to be shaped by interoperable infrastructure and smarter regulation, stronger collaboration between banks and fintechs, and more affordable NFC-enabled, biometric-ready smartphones.
But technology alone will not create adoption. CashAfrica still has to make the customer journey simple enough that contactless feels obvious rather than experimental.
There are already fast transfers and cards, so any new payment method has to answer a straightforward question: Why should a customer move from what they already know?
For CashAfrica, the answer is simplicity. Just tap and go. In Bello’s vision, a transaction that can take several minutes could become a five-second tap, with the complexity handled underneath.
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