PayInc (formerly BankservAfrica) is the critical infrastructure provider for South Africa’s payments system. As the largest automated clearing house in Africa, it connects banks and millions of end-users, enabling card authorisation, POS and ATM transactions, batch payments, account verifications and real-time clearing of interbank payments within 60 seconds. Every month, PayInc processes around 400 million transactions, for a total of nearly 5 billion a year.
As part of its transformation from a traditional payments infrastructure provider into a digital-first organisation, PayInc began its cloud migration journey three years ago. Now nearing completion, this milestone marks the beginning of a new era for the 53-year-old company.
For Janade Sewnarain, PayInc Head of Infrastructure, the migration project was a highlight in his lengthy IT career.
“The PayInc cloud migration was one of the biggest and most complex migrations I have worked on,” he says.
Sewnarain explains that the decision to migrate PayInc’s systems to the cloud followed the successful launch of PayShap, built and run in the cloud since 2023. The real-time transaction platform has grown from around 1 million transactions a month at launch to over 45 million a month.
“Geared for 24/7 operations with a high focus on security, availability and stability, we have seen great success with PayShap. It illustrated the scalability and reliability of the cloud,” he says.
Seeking to modernise its overall infrastructure, PayInc opted to move to the AWS Cloud. The cloud migration represented a radical shift and move. Core products had to move, which Sewnarain says required a lot of engagement with banks, and over 100 workloads had to move without any impact on the country’s critical payments systems.
Sewnarain explains: “It was critically important for us to do it right the first time, so we put many mechanisms in place to drive the success of the project. While it was essentially a lift and shift into the cloud environment, a lot of rearchitecting needed to happen by default. To help us narrow our focus, I created six cloud pillars. These included the technical aspects of the migration – looking at complexity, dependencies and impacts on customers, as well as which workloads could be lifted and shifted and which needed to be re-architected.”
An extensive skills development initiative was a second pillar of the migration. Sewnarain says this component of the migration project also represented a milestone in terms of the scale of the initiative. “We have up to 200 people in the CIO division, and we want to retain their critical IP on payment systems while upskilling them on cloud technologies. I led an aggressive skills development and certification programme to support the migration. Over the past 12 months, we certified 50 people – equivalent to around one certification per week.”
Another important cloud migration pillar was the cloud FinOps pillar. Says Sewnarain: “We were early FinOps adopters because we wanted to get a handle on cloud costs and efficiencies, ensuring we could optimise costs.”
Sewnarain notes that PayInc’s cloud migration was driven internally, with support from select partners providing specialist expertise where required. “We led the migration end-to-end, leveraging strategic partners such as RDB Consulting to complement our internal capabilities in specific areas like Linux, Windows and database environments,” he explains. “Given the scarcity of niche skills in the payments sector, this collaboration helped us accelerate execution while maintaining full ownership of the programme.”
PayInc is closing off its migration programme by the end of this month, with its next immediate goal the significant task of closing and decommissioning data centres. Sewnarain says the organisation’s longer-term focus will be on further modernisation, microservices, automation, advanced APIs and re-architecture, while maintaining a continuous focus on stability, security and availability.
“It is possible to make payments even faster, safer, more efficient and more inclusive, and these are among our goals. Moving to the cloud will give us an opportunity to further modernise our systems and bring financial inclusivity to more South Africans,” he says.
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