The South African payments technology company sets out how real-time payments, AI-led risk intelligence and agentic commerce are reshaping what merchants need from a payments partner.
At its inaugural Evolve event, Ozow announced its evolution from a Pay by Bank provider into an end-to-end payments and financial infrastructure partner. The company is bringing together multiple payment rails, fraud prevention, data and AI-led capabilities through a single platform, with a number of these initiatives already live.
As payments become increasingly interconnected and complex, businesses need more than individual ways to pay. They need infrastructure that brings together the technology and intelligence required to support how they operate, serve their customers and grow.
The company built its name on Pay by Bank payments. As a full PSP, it operates multiple major payment rails through one orchestrated platform, unified behind a single API, alongside fraud prevention, data and AI-led products.
Ozow has been a leader in account-to-account payments in South Africa, first to market with PayShap Request integration and a range of supporting bank APIs. That leadership hasn’t come from working alone: recent partnerships include Lula, bringing SME funding of up to R5 million into the Ozow Merchant Portal; HappyPay, bringing buy now, pay later into Ozow’s merchant network; and FNB and RMB, on the FNB/RMB Payment Request.
“We solve the problems and implement complex solutioning that results in an exceptionally simple customer experience,” says Rachel Cowan, Interim CEO of Ozow.
“We began with a very focused proposition in Pay by Bank. Today, our role has grown beyond payments: as an infrastructure partner, we take on more of the complexity that comes with moving money, so our merchants can deliver the simplest experience to their customers.”
The shift changes what simple means for merchants. Where the company’s early simplicity came from doing one thing well, its value today comes from absorbing the complexity of multiple payment rails on the merchant’s behalf while offering considerably more capability.
Catherine Korsten, Chief Growth Officer at Ozow, says merchants engage with Ozow in ways suited to the complexity of their business. Enterprise merchants typically come to Ozow for bespoke solutioning around their own specific payment needs.
Ozow’s developer hub has had an agentic-first update, enabling businesses to integrate Ozow through a single prompt, while enhanced plugins let merchants on the most popular e-commerce platforms integrate quickly and easily, unlocking Ozow’s full suite of payment services rather than Pay by Bank alone. “We want to be your expert partner in how money moves all the way through your business, not just when your customer pays you,” says Korsten.
Smart orchestration was a topic highlighted by Ozow’s CTO, Riaan Hanekom: a system designed to understand both the merchant and the consumer within a transaction, balancing how a customer prefers to pay with the merchant’s priorities, whether that is speed, reliability or cost, to determine the most appropriate payment experience for each transaction.
Fraud prevention is a further part of that shift. South Africa recorded the highest suspected digital fraud rate of any African country in 2025, at 3.0% of transactions, according to TransUnion’s H1 2026 Top Fraud Trends report. Rutendo Nyathi, Chief Risk and Governance Officer at Ozow, sees the company’s risk and governance function as an enabler, not a blocker, and has built a team combining internal and external intelligence tools with visibility across its merchant base and industries, catching fraud patterns early before they become individual incidents. Over the past six months, that capability has prevented hundreds of millions of Rands in potential fraudulent transactions.
That update follows work to make Ozow’s technical documentation discoverable and readable by AI, enabling agents to interpret the guidance and act on it directly rather than requiring developers to translate documentation into integration steps manually.
“As we take on more of the payments stack for our merchants, we take on more of the responsibility that comes with it,” says Cowan. “That means smart routing, fraud protection and AI technology that all work invisibly in the background, so our merchants never have to think about it.”
Hanekom used a concept demo to show where this could lead: an AI agent given standing permission to top up an electricity account whenever the balance falls below a set threshold, within a defined spending limit, completing the purchase autonomously and carrying what Hanekom called a “permission slip”, proof of who authorised the transaction and the boundaries within which it may act. It’s a look at what agentic commerce could mean for South African businesses, and a view to how Ozow is viewing the future of commerce.
Cowan points to what she calls an “autonomous finance stack” as the direction this is heading: pay-ins, payouts and reconciliation happening without manual intervention, and over time, more of the processes that touch money in a business automated so Ozow’s role extends from a payments partner to a broader financial infrastructure partner.
