Lineshree Moodley, country head of Visa South Africa.
Visa’s newly launched Johannesburg data centre is gaining strong uptake from South African banks and fintechs, emerging as a core component of the country’s payments ecosystem.
Launched in July, the data centre is Visa’s first on the African continent. It forms a major part of a R1 billion investment by the payment card services firm over the next three years, to boost local digital payment infrastructure, process transactions within SA, enhance security, speed up innovation, support SMEs, and position the region for digital growth.
During an interview, Lineshree Moodley, country head of Visa South Africa, tells ITWeb the facility expands VisaNet, strengthening Africa’s fintech ecosystem by bringing innovative processing closer to local businesses and consumers.
Since going live, the hub has attracted customers across the financial services spectrum, from established banks and card acquirers to fast-growing fintechs, all seeking faster, more resilient and locally compliant access to Visa’s global payments network, she notes.
“With this data centre, we are bringing high-tech capabilities closer to the market in which we operate, where domestic transactions are processed. We really want to leverage the technologies we have to innovate and deliver more solutions for Africa’s digital economy,” states Moodley.
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“The data centre has been performing as expected, processing domestic transactions for multiple financial institutions. All financial institutions that have a partnership with Visa are currently processing their transactions through the data centre.”
For SA’s digital economy, the launch of the Visa data centre represents more than a technical upgrade, she points out.
It signals a long-term investment in local payments infrastructure, supports regulatory objectives around data sovereignty, and lowers the barrier for both incumbents and start-ups to participate in digital commerce.
By hosting a local node of VisaNet in SA, the data centre allows transactions to be authorised, routed and settled closer to where they originate, she added.
For banks, this translates into lower latency, fewer transaction timeouts and improved reliability at point-of-sale, particularly for high-volume card, contactless and mobile payments.
Regulatory considerations are also driving more customers to connect to the data centre.
With financial regulators increasingly focused on data residency and cross-border data flows, the presence of a domestic Visa processing facility enables banks and fintechs to keep sensitive transaction data within SA.
“This simplifies compliance with local regulatory requirements and reduces the operational complexity associated with routing payments through offshore data centres.
“Beyond performance and compliance, the data centre plays a growing role in strengthening resilience across the payments ecosystem. By providing local processing and built-in redundancy, it reduces dependence on international network routes and mitigates the impact of global outages.”
For banks, this enhances business continuity and lowers systemic risk, while merchants benefit from more consistent uptime and fewer declined transactions caused by network delays.
Fintechs, meanwhile, are using the centre as a launchpad for innovation.
The Johannesburg facility provides faster and more predictable access to Visa services such as tokenisation, card vaulting and fraud analytics, enabling fintechs to roll out digital wallets, e-commerce tools and new payment products more quickly.
“Importantly, Visa’s data centre differs fundamentally from mainstream public cloud facilities. While cloud platforms are designed for general-purpose computing and elastic scaling, the Visa facility is purpose-built for payments. It is optimised for deterministic transaction routing, ultra-high availability and payment-industry compliance standards such as PCI-DSS,” Moodley continued.
Since its launch, the Johannesburg data centre has also been a catalyst for job creation and skills development in SA’s tech sector.
Visa’s R1 billion investment includes plans to recruit a range of specialised professionals, from data engineers and payments infrastructure experts to business development and analytics roles that support connectivity with banks and fintechs.
“Visa opened its doors in South Africa in 1992, and we now have over 200 people servicing Africa from our South African office. With the establishment of the data centre, we’ve added additional roles and created more jobs locally, although I’m not in a position to disclose the exact number of opportunities created,” concluded Moodley.
