Delivered at FORUS Digital, before Single Source Studios. Rainier Potgieter led engineering across the platform.
Context
The South African minibus taxi sector moves a large share of the country every day and runs almost entirely on cash. That makes it one of the largest cash-based transport economies on the continent, and one of the hardest to bring onto a payment rail, because the money never passes through anything that can see it.
FORUS Digital set out to change that with WOW: a fintech platform combining digital payments, GPS tracking and blockchain settlement for the sector.
Built
Engineering leadership across the whole platform. That meant building card payment systems with revenue sharing, and it meant addressing critical flaws already sitting inside the existing payment flow before anything new could safely be built on top of them.
The Telebirr integration closed the coverage gaps Visa and Mastercard left open. VAT was automated across the transaction path rather than reconciled after the fact. The work was delivered in partnership with Ecentric and ECTTC.
Stack
Laravel, PHP, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Node.js, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Docker, with third-party payment and banking provider integration alongside blockchain and digital currency systems.
Outcome
WOW won Fintech Innovation of the Year at the 2024 Africa Tech Festival Awards, and entered provincial rollout from December 2024.
This was a regulated payments environment from the first day to the last. Compliance and audit requirements shaped the design rather than being retrofitted onto it, which is the difference between a system that passes an audit and a system that survives one.