What has been proved.

Adoption, measured

We ran the full wallet stack in a live pilot in Rustenburg, in a cash-only community where nobody had used a wallet before. The question was whether people would adopt it. The 30-day sign-up target was reached by lunchtime on day two. At steady state 734 people were paying from wallets for daily spend, 97 merchants were accepting them, and the rail carried 111 transactions a day. Traders signed up and loaded their first balance on the spot.

The only two questions people asked were whether they could top up from a bank account in real time, and whether they could put all their cash in. The pilot proved the stack end to end: onboarding, wallet-to-wallet and wallet-to-merchant payments, settlement and reporting.

Built for national load

South Africa's commuter economy moves an estimated 16.5 million people every weekday. The platform has been built and tested for that load: 16.5 million transactions in a three-hour peak window.

The same software elsewhere

The engines under the rail run 22 central payment infrastructures in 26 countries, as published by ProgressSoft. The full record is on the group site, sommaredde.com.