Capitec Agrees to Open Capitec Pay to Rivals Via Walletdoc Deal
Capitec has agreed to open its Capitec Pay payment platform to rival institutions through a deal with Walletdoc, a forced interoperability arrangement that resets open-banking dynamics in South Africa's retail banking market.
Capitec Pay: owning the rail and the train at the same time
Capitec just bought Walletdoc — a payments business that resells Capitec Pay to merchants. That puts Capitec in a position most regulators hate: it owns the payment infrastructure that rival providers need to access, and now it also competes directly against those same rivals for merchant clients.
South Africa's Competition Commission spotted the problem and attached conditions. Capitec must open Capitec Pay to any third party that can technically connect to it, and cannot use what it learns from those rivals — their merchant lists, their pricing, their transaction data — against them.
That's the right call. But the more interesting condition is the one forcing Capitec to treat PayShap, the banking industry's shared instant-payment system, no worse than its own product. PayShap has struggled — high fees have kept it slow — and Capitec is also a part-owner of PayInc, the company that runs it. So the bank being told not to disadvantage the shared rail partly owns that rail too.
Whether conditions on paper translate into genuine openness is the thing to watch once the tribunal rules.
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- Capitec agrees to open Capitec Pay to rivals in Walletdoc deal · techcentral.co.za · T2