Every profession has those occasions that make you stop and reflect. Attending the Global Excellence & Leadership Awards Africa 2026 was one of those moments for me.
I am proud to have been named ‘Most Influential FinTech & Payments Leader – Africa 2026’. Whilst award recognition is an individual achievement, I attribute this recognition to the exceptional team of people I have had the pleasure of working with over the years; from my colleagues and clients to partners and fellow industry enthusiasts.
Attending the awards ceremony in the beautiful city of Cape Town was inspiring. It was incredible to see so many talented leaders and experts who are dedicated to progressing and improving their respective industries. For me, one of the main insights from the evening was that Africa’s digital transformation is underway. If anything, it is already here.
From fintech and financial services to digital commerce and more, African organisations are embracing digital transformation and the power of innovation. Payment innovation, in particular, is at the forefront of Africa’s digital transformation.
It was wonderful to hear so many conversations around innovation and growth across the continent. As a proud South African, it filled me with pride to see how far Africa continues to succeed in terms of payments innovation. From mobile money services to digital banking and the pursuit of financial inclusion for Africa’s unbanked and underserved communities.
This award has given me a renewed sense of pride in what I have helped to build in the payments industry over the past 25 years. But it has also granted me a great sense of responsibility.
Responsibility to continue doing my part in aiding the development of the payments industry and helping shape the future of payments worldwide.
Companies like Iliad Solutions are in a unique position to make a difference. As a payments testing and quality assurance specialist, we have the ability to help drive economic growth and financial inclusion throughout Africa and beyond. With this opportunity comes accountability; we have a duty to help ensure that every payment service provider meets the highest standards of security, reliability and accessibility demanded by an ever-growing digital economy.
As a privileged Panellist at the Leadership Awards, I could proudly represent Iliad Solutions as an industry expert in responding to an Industry-Specific Question:
As payment systems continue to evolve rapidly across emerging markets, how can organisations ensure that Testing, Compliance, and Operational Resilience keep pace with innovation? My response was:
As payments get faster, risk doesn’t disappear – it just moves faster too. So, the only way testing, compliance, and resilience keep pace with innovation is to make them continuous, not episodic. Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Testing: Kill the idea of quarterly releases. In emerging markets, we deal with 50+ device types, patchy networks, and USSD fallbacks. You need chaos testing in production and simulation sandboxes that mirror real African conditions – low-end Androids, 2G timeouts, agent network reversals. If you’re not testing for failure at 2am during a power cut in Kano, you’re not ready.
Compliance: Shift from “checklist compliance” to “compliance by design.” With regulators like CBN, SARB, and BoG moving to API-based reporting and real-time risk engines, your systems need to emit compliance data natively. Think automated STR filings, dynamic transaction limits based on risk scoring, and consent ledgers on chain. Partner with regulators early. PAPSS and the AfCFTA protocols are being written now – influence them. Operational Resilience: Payments are now national infrastructure. A 10-minute outage is a headline. So, adopt anti-fragile architecture: multi-cloud, multi-rail, active-active cores, and circuit breakers that degrade gracefully. But tech is only 50%. The other half is agent and merchant resilience. When systems fail, your human network keeps commerce alive. Train them, equip them, compensate them for downtime.
Bottom line: Innovation without resilience is just risk. In Africa, we don’t have the luxury of “move fast and break things” because things breaking means a market trader doesn’t eat. So, we move fast and build trust. That’s the African model of fintech – and it’s becoming the global one. To conclude, the Iliad Solutions t3 payments testing platform addresses all these aspects in keeping pace with innovation.
I am excited about the future of payments. I can’t wait to see what the future holds, but for the time being, we will continue to do what we do best: providing our clients with the payment testing solutions they need to innovate, collaborate and execute payment projects with confidence and excellence.
Frans Stander, Iliad Solutions, Africa & Middle East
Frans Stander is based in Cape Town, South Africa where he heads-up the MEA Region (Middle East / Africa) for Iliad Solutions in cooperation with Payvolution CEMEA. Frans can be contacted on: frans.stander@iliad-solutions.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/fransstander