Business29.04.2026

The man who built one of South Africa’s biggest payments companies is back

By Jan Vermeulen

PayFast co-founder Jonathan Smit has returned to the payments industry, this time as the buyer rather than the entrepreneur, after acquiring iVeri Payment Technologies.

Smit became executive chair of iVeri in July 2025 and recently acquired the company from co-founders Barry Coetzee and Roland Elferink.

The deal marks Smit’s return to the sector where he built his name, scaling PayFast from “me and a laptop” into one of South Africa’s largest payment gateways.

Speaking on The Money Show, Smit said he had been “stuck back into the world of business and investing and payments” for the past three years.

He exited PayFast in 2019 when DPO Group acquired the company and stayed on until August 2021. After leaving PayFast, Smit took time away before establishing Red Leopard Capital in January 2023.

Through the investment firm, he said he had backed “30 to 40 different things” across local, international, public, and private markets.

However, Smit said he kept returning to two areas that interested him most: energy and e-mobility, and fintech, specifically payments.

iVeri falls squarely into the latter category. The company has operated for nearly three decades and processes payments across more than ten African countries.

It supports online and in-person payments, with hundreds of thousands of terminals, millions of transactions, and billions of US dollars in processed value.

For Smit, the opportunity is not to rebuild from scratch, but to take an established African payments infrastructure business into its next phase.

Building after PayFast

Smit’s first payments journey began after studying computer engineering at the University of Pretoria and working at Aurecon (then Africon) and Accenture.

He officially co-founded PayFast with Bidorbuy founder Andy Higgins in May 2007, targeting small and medium-sized businesses that struggled to accept online payments.

“At the time, if you wanted to accept payments online, you needed to have six months of trading history with a bank,” Smit said.

PayFast’s early years were slow. Smit said the business was effectively just him and a laptop for its first three years.

He only hired the company’s first employee in 2010, and the business later grew to more than 130 staff before his exit.

Smit said payments was a difficult industry because it combined regulation, compliance, fraud risk, and the need to earn trust over time.

“You have a red target on your back when it comes to the fact that you handle money,” he said.

He said founders in the sector had to survive long enough for customers to trust them with their money, which could not be rushed.

Smit described exiting PayFast in 2019 and leaving the company in 2021 as “incredibly hard” after spending almost 15 years building it with a close team.

A founder-to-founder handover

iVeri co-founder Barry Coetzee said the company’s future was in good hands and that every conversation about the company’s future involved protecting its legacy.

“Over five years, I walked away from corporate buyers who arrived with a familiar playbook: fold iVeri into their existing structure, cut the team, absorb the brand,” he said.

“Jonathan was different. When he reached out, it was clear he wasn’t looking for an asset to strip, but a legacy to build upon. I didn’t find Jonathan Smit; he found me.”

Coetzee said Smit understood what it took to build a lasting payments company and had the technical depth needed for iVeri’s next phase.

“The future of commerce is being shaped by AI — agentic transactions, decisions made and executed without human intervention,” he said.

“I’m honest enough to acknowledge that leading a business through that kind of shift requires a different energy and orientation than the one that built it.”

Coetzee said that was not a criticism of what they had achieved, but a recognition of what would come next.

Smit told The Money Show that iVeri had quietly built a “powerhouse of a payments business” over 25 to 30 years.

He said part of the plan was to “shine more of a light” on the business and drive digitisation across the continent.

That included positioning iVeri for a payments market being reshaped by artificial intelligence and increasingly automated transaction flows.

Getting back in the arena

Smit’s return to payments is in a markedly different role from his PayFast years. This time, he is the one taking over an established infrastructure company.

In a separate interview before the acquisition, Smit said fintech businesses were tough because they operated in highly regulated environments dealing with money.

Speaking to Telana Simpson, who helped Andy Higgins launch Bidorbuy, Smit said resilience, culture, and teamwork were central to surviving the difficult periods that come with building payment systems.

“Sometimes the only reason that we succeed is just because we’re doggedly persistent as entrepreneurs,” he said.

Smit said his most important lesson as an entrepreneur was around people, especially hiring good people earlier than you think you need to.

For iVeri, that focus aligned with Coetzee’s view that the company’s real asset is its people and market knowledge.

Speaking to MyBroadband, Smit said he doesn’t believe his risk appetite has changed much over the years, whether before or after his exit from PayFast.

“As an entrepreneur, I have a natively high risk tolerance; I’m able to operate as well as support early-stage businesses when most others wouldn’t, and I’m not afraid of taking calculated risks,” he said.

“What I do have now is a much better understanding of risk and the mitigation thereof, which one has to bear in mind when allocating resources, namely time and capital.”

Asked what success at iVeri looks like three years from now, Smit said he believes the company is on a journey with a much longer time horizon.

“Not being driven by investor capital, we can afford to take a productive, long-term view,” he said.

“The business is already successful and sustainable, and my primary focus now is on brand and growth.”

What he would like to see in three years, Smit said, is that the iVeri brand is more well-known, and that they have a happy, high-performing team.

He would also like to see that iVeri had strongly grown its customer base, presence, and transaction volumes across the continent.

Regarding how the roles of founder and investor differ, Smit said there was a lot of friction in the market between the role-players:

Investors who have capital, but don’t really understand what it takes to be an operator
Entrepreneurs who don’t really understand the demands of capital
Acquirers whose agendas are not clear to the founders they’re buying out

“Ultimately, all parties are invested in ‘success’, but what that looks like could differ between them, as well as the way to get there,” said Smit.

“I have been privileged to perform in all these roles, and it is somewhat of a superpower as I understand all parties and their incentives and have experienced businesses through all stages.”