Direct Transact, the largest independent provider of transaction processing solutions for banks and businesses in SA, is appointing three financial industry heavy-hitters to expand the local industry’s open finance capabilities in the global market.
The company, which handles more than R30 billion in financial industry transaction flows per month – the flows of nearly 70% of SA’s second-tier clearing banks and nearly 10% of SA’s monthly transactional value through BankservAfrica – is appointing FinTech trailblazer Christo Davel as the company’s Chief Commercial Officer (CCO), C-suite banking veteran Arina McDonald as Non-Executive Director and banking technologist Clinton Haley as Executive Head of Production and Software Development.
McDonald is a former CFO at Standard Bank Africa and Atlas Mara, with extensive corporate advisory and governance experience. Haley previously held top technical positions at FNB, where he was in charge of credit card technology and enterprise finance solutions. Davel has built some of SA’s hottest tech startups over the past 20 years.
Davel’s notable ventures include conceptualising and building SA’s first software-led direct-sales platforms for the insurance industry, later acquired by Old Mutual; SA’s first online-only and people-first bank 20twenty, later bought by Standard Chartered; SA’s first personal finance management aggregation platform 22seven, also later bought by Old Mutual; and most recently the Kin app for joint money relationships.
Direct Transact is a company that enables banks, retailers and other businesses to behave like FinTechs that offer innovative payment solutions to the market. It pioneered Software-as-a-Service for the banking industry in South Africa.
“We look forward to an exciting future in the global payments and banking innovation ecosystem, and we wish Christo, Arina and Clinton a long and happy future as part of the Direct Transact family,” says Direct Transact CEO Hennie Dreyer.
Dreyer and Anthony De Gray Birch, COO of Direct Transact, will be working with their bolstered management team – with Davel playing a key role as CCO – to lead the local SaaS-hosted payments and retail banking services industry from its current infrastructure setup into a future of expanded open banking and cloud-based technologies.
Their vision for the future includes enabling more banks and non-banks to join the fintech ecosystem and operate in a borderless, seamless and real-time financial future that has real users’ needs at heart.
