Mastercard's Gabriël Swanepoel outlines the company's strategic vision for a prosperous and inclusive digital economy in Africa, addressing key challenges and opportunities for SMEs.
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In this interview, Gabriël Swanepoel, the Mastercard division president for Africa, discusses the company's 2025 achievements and its strategic vision for a prosperous, inclusive, and secure digital economy across the continent.
Q1: South Africa plays an important role in Mastercard’s global real-time payments network. How can this strength be used to give South African SMEs a real advantage when trading across Africa and internationally when doing business?
A: Our strategy in South Africa is focused on tangible investments in local infrastructure to benefit South African businesses. We have made significant investments in new on-soil technology, including local data centers, which enable us to process transactions more efficiently and securely within the country.
This local foundation is critical because it allows us to roll out world-first innovations here. South Africa will be the first market where Mastercard enables real-time card payments, giving merchants same-day access to their funds – a significant shift in a landscape where, according to McKinsey, 90% of transactions in Africa are still cash-based.
Improving cash flow changes how businesses plan, invest and operate. This is especially significant to SMEs as transactions are not only faster, but secure, efficient and accessible, giving them the ability to scale their businesses.
Q2: South Africa has strong digital payments systems, but many people and businesses are still excluded. What needs to change to turn digital capability into real economic participation for more South Africans?
A: The most powerful shift we can make is ensuring that digital tools solve real-world problems for the businesses and communities that are still excluded. This begins with lowering the barriers to entry with accessible technology.
Our Tap on Phone solution turns a standard smartphone into a secure payment device, removing the cost and complexity of traditional point of sale (POS) hardware. This is part of a broader pan-African effort that has seen us launch 15 new SME-focused programs in the last 18 months, driven by cross-sector collaborations with governments, financial institutions and fintech partners.
This includes tailored solutions that support SME growth, such as Easy Savings, a programme that provides automatic rebates and discounts on business tools to eligible small-business cardholders at participating merchants.
Reaching underserved and rural communities requires a different kind of commitment. Through initiatives like Community Pass - an interoperable platform that provides secure digital identities and works offline - we connect underserved rural communities to essential services such as financial tools, agriculture, and healthcare, enabling greater digital and financial inclusion at scale. Our goal with this project is to register 15 million users across Africa on the platform.
When the right tools meet the right collaborations, digital capability becomes genuine economic participation.
Q3: Africa’s digital payments economy is expected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2030. What gives you the most confidence that this growth will be achieved, and how is Mastercard helping to unlock the opportunity?
A: Africa’s rapid growth in internet penetration and financial inclusion - projected to rise at annual rates of 20% and 6% respectively - combined with accelerating consumer adoption of digital payments, fintech innovation and supportive public-private investment, gives us confidence the continent will reach a $1.5 trillion digital payments economy by 2030.
Fostering trust is central to our strategy, and we achieve it by making tangible investments in the security and integrity of the payment ecosystem. To bolster trust, safety and convenience, we have advanced key digital infrastructure across the continent.
This includes implementing concrete upgrades like tokenisation, enhancing our digital identity capabilities, and rolling out virtual card solutions. As our on-ground presence in markets like South Africa expands, our focus remains on strengthening a secure, frictionless digital commerce environment that works for everyone.
Q4: A 45% increase in payment acceptance is a major milestone. Beyond growing the network, how will Mastercard measure real impact and economic progress across African markets?
A: Network growth is necessary, but it is not the full story. The measure of real impact is what that network enables – for businesses, for communities and for economies. Over the past two and a half years, Mastercard has accelerated its Africa expansion, opening new offices in Ghana, Uganda and Mauritius, and growing our employee base by almost 20% continent-wide.
This expanded on-ground presence allows us to co-create solutions that are genuinely tailored to the needs of African communities and merchants, rather than adapting global models that may not fit local realities and nuances. Combined with significant investments in products and infrastructure, this is how we are actively unlocking the continent's digital economy.
Q5: How can AI be used right now to help more African businesses take part in the digital economy, and what should companies and governments be doing today to make that future real?
A: AI's most immediate and measurable impact in Africa is broad, but I will highlight two relevant fronts specific to the payments industry: expanding access to capital and making that access secure enough to trust.
On the credit side, the lack of formal financial history has long been a barrier to growth for small businesses and farmers across the continent. Mastercard’s AI-driven credit scoring models aims to address this.
By analysing alternative data sources such as supply chain information, mobile usage, or even agricultural data like crop yields from satellite imagery, we can assess creditworthiness for individuals who were previously unscorable.
But inclusion without security is not sustainable. As more businesses enter the digital economy, the fraud risk they face scales with them. This is where AI’s role in protection becomes critical. Mastercard has a host of cybersecurity and fraud prevention products designed to mitigate and alleviate risk.
Once such product is Decision Intelligence Pro which analyses over one trillion data points in real time, assessing the complex relationships within a transaction to determine risk, delivering 200% higher fraud detection.
Since 2018, Mastercard has invested approximately $11 billion in cybersecurity innovation, embracing AI to fight AI and helping our customers build genuine resilience as they grow.
Realising that opportunity requires both dimensions working together: AI that opens doors to finance, and AI that ensures those doors remain secure. For companies, that means building on trusted payment rails with inclusion as an explicit design principle.
For governments, it means creating regulatory environments that promote protection and security. Together, those commitments make Africa’s $1.5 trillion digital payments opportunity real and equitably shared.