News24 | Real-time money is changing everything. Is your business keeping up?

Most of us have stopped thinking about payments. You tap your card, tap your phone, and walk out. It just works. But behind that two-second tap is one of the most complex and fast-moving infrastructure systems in the modern economy – and it is changing faster than most businesses realise.

In this standalone episode of Bruce Whitfield’s Business Week, Bruce sits down with Chris Zietsman, executive head of Capitec Payments, to pull back the curtain on what is actually happening when money moves – and what the next three years are going to look like.

Zietsman spent six years at SnapScan, first as CFO and later as CEO, watching South Africa’s payment ecosystem evolve from days of clearing time to card transactions settling in two to three seconds – faster, he notes, than Mexico manages on a good day.

He unpacks the PayShap instant payment rail now enabling real-time bank transfers for as little as 20 cents, why Capitec can onboard a new card machine merchant in five minutes in any branch, and how the cost of card transactions has fallen from 3%-4% decade ago to below 1% today.

But the most compelling part of the conversation is his prediction about where the next competitive battleground lies: Not speed. Not price. Security. As friction disappears, so does the safety net that used to give defrauded consumers time to stop a transaction. The winners in the next three years, he says, will be the players who use AI and behavioural monitoring to protect clients in real time.

You thought you were just tapping your phone. It turns out you were participating in one of the most sophisticated financial systems on Earth.

This podcast is sponsored by Capitec.

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