Transforming to Grow Africa

At Interswitch, we are constantly re-aligning our strategy and processes in view of the dynamic environment we operate in, to ensure optimal service delivery and business agility.

I would therefore like to intimate you with a recent strategic transformation that has brought about progressive evolution in our business architecture and organizational structure. This transformation is driven by a strategic imperative that necessitates a greater focus on emerging fintech sectors and technologies, underpinned by an organization-wide adoption of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) operational philosophy, geared towards enhancing our processes and capabilities and ultimately enabling us to deliver more effective service and innovation to all segments of our customer base.

As part of what we have themed our ‘4.5.6’ strategy, which encapsulates our aspirations to operate in 4 defined regions across Africa over the next 5 years with six (6) operating business lines. We have found it pertinent to align our structure to boost our commercial agility and make us nimbler and more responsive to the increasingly dynamic market in which we operate, and essentially, to the evolving requirements of our customers and partners across various sectors. This progressive evolution makes Interswitch more flexible and better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities and trends we see across regional and global markets as our business scales internationally, while also adequately catering to the current realities within our domestic business space.

Essentially, one of the core benefits accruable from this business reorganization is the significant enhancement of our execution capabilities, catalyzed by seamless adoption of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) across our entire group. Through this, we are positioned to execute better through a more collaborative approach which empowers our people to do more and derive fulfilment from achieving our common purpose, as we work towards our vision of a prosperous Africa driven by a seamless exchange of value and commerce.

To this end, our five (5) erstwhile business divisions, notably Payment Processing, Payment Tokens, Digital Commerce, Industry Vertical Markets & Interswitch Financial Inclusion Services have been reorganized into six (6) complimentary yet distinct and self-governing business lines, each with their Managing Director, called:

• Purepay (Payment Processing)

• Systegra (Digital Payment Infrastructure)

• Paymate (Merchant Acquiring & APIs)

• Indeco (Digital Commerce & Ecosystem Platforms)

• Paytoken (Cards & Digital Tokens)

• Inclusio (Financial Inclusion & Payment Service Bank)

These new business lines have been created and designed to ensure that we have the required focus to drive growth in emerging sectors/markets with high growth potential. For example, we have carved out our merchant acquiring & API marketplace business (Paymate) as a stand-alone, to ensure we are able to deliver greater and specifically tailored value to merchants and SMEs.

To ensure that this transformation is seamless, we have put in place a holistic change management program to manage all internal and external imperatives occasioned by this evolution, including ensuring that our clients, customers, partners and stakeholders are adequately guided and kept abreast of the developments, and to ensure there is zero, or at the most, the barest minimal disruption to our service delivery to you.

Further to this notification which I have deemed very imperative to personally send to you, your key business contacts from Interswitch would be following up with more specific guidance regarding how this evolution positions us to deliver more optimized service to you, and how it is a win-win for us all.

We appreciate your valuable partnership with the Interswitch Group, whilst looking forward to sustaining our relationship to further deepen productive collaboration with your organization.