Cape Town – Africa’s payment future belongs to integrated platforms rather than the patchwork of standalone systems still common across the industry, BPC Founder, President and CEO Anatoly Loginov told bankers and fintech leaders in Cape Town on Wednesday, 21 October 2026.
Loginov was opening the BPC Client Conference at the Westin Hotel, a gathering of the company’s customers and partners that last met in Mexico. He described the trip from Fort Lauderdale to Cape Town as roughly 10,000 miles, and said the journey BPC and its SmartVista customer family had made since the Mexico meeting had produced “profound results given in so small amount of time.”
He told delegates that BPC had been fortunate on several fronts. The company began at a moment when the industry standards that shape today’s internet, mobile, security and smart card payments were already in place, allowing it to build for a new era of payments from scratch. It also started in a market where retail payments barely existed and where people were eager to embrace new technology, with no legacy systems standing in the way. Its founding team, he said, was a small group of talented software developers who combined their skills with deep knowledge of Western banking and the payments industry.
In less than a decade, according to Loginov, BPC moved from switching, card management, merchant management and fraud prevention to its current position as a leading integrated payment platform. He argued that larger, more established vendors may offer a similar range of products, but those products were often built by different teams, at different times and in different regions, and now struggle on ageing underlying technology. Smaller players, meanwhile, tend to offer only one product, such as prepaid services.
“For you as customers you need all type of weapons to compete,” he said, adding that institutions should have an immediate choice of tools rather than being tied to a single offering.
What has changed since Mexico
Loginov said the SmartVista platform was already fully formed by the time of the Mexico conference, but the past year brought several significant developments. Chief among them is a common API across the platform, which means customers can work with any product or feature through the same set of interfaces. He described this as one of the platform’s major and most distinctive advances in the industry.
Other upgrades include real time settlement within the card management system. “So from now you can stop thinking about closing the day,” he told the audience, explaining that accounts can now be settled minute by minute and second by second.
He also pointed to fraud prevention tools designed to detect and combat sophisticated schemes in which activity on each individual channel may look legitimate, but where something malicious is happening across channels combined. Using analytics, he said, the probability of such fraud going undetected is almost zero. The platform has also grown richer in functions, particularly in corporate and investment banking.
Loginov said the SmartVista customer family had also changed considerably. For years, BPC worked to earn the trust of larger institutions, and over the last year it began winning customers that rank first not only regionally but globally, including the largest brands in Indonesia and Thailand, as well as institutions in South Africa.
The next ten years
Looking ahead a decade, Loginov said technology tends to move quickly, but not as quickly as many expect. “If you look say smart cards it took about 40 years to become general accepted,” he said, noting that the internet took 10 to 15 years to move from a slow start to general acceptance, and that AI is on a similar path. “I don’t expect any revolutionary things,” he added.
What he does expect is a decisive shift from point to point solutions to platforms. Legacy systems built from separate products and merely grouped under a common brand will disappear, he predicted, while newer point to point technologies will either be absorbed by platform players or give way to integrated platforms.
“There will be no discussion about channels. The platform is going to be multi-channel by definition. It doesn’t matter whether you have ATM POS, internet and internet of things,” he said. The same applies to products such as debit, credit and loyalty, which will all be linked to customer and business accounts on a single platform.
Loginov said BPC never set out through academic research but came from a practical background, studying what was not working in existing solutions. Its early ambition, which he called almost an obsession, was legacy replacement. Behind that, he said, sat a broader vision of giving customers freedom: first freedom of choice in infrastructure, databases and hardware, and ultimately freedom to do whatever they need, including freedom from dependence on BPC itself through the flexibility and configurable parameters built into SmartVista.
Why Africa matters
Turning to the host continent, Loginov said legacy replacement is highly relevant to South Africa, where BPC expects to work with its first and second customers there on complete digital transformation, not only for individual institutions but for the country as a whole.
Elsewhere on the continent, he said, the opportunity is less about replacing old systems and more about bringing freedom of choice, tools and infrastructure to institutions of every size, regardless of the country they come from. He compared this to what the internet did for the global population.
“It equalizes the ground. It gives everybody equal opportunities,” he said.
Loginov said that for years the question facing banks was not whether to modernise but where to move and with what, and that BPC’s recent achievements now put it in a position to show a proven path through SmartVista. He predicted the SmartVista family would grow bigger and stronger, and asked, “why not the biggest in the world. Let’s see what the future comes.”
He urged delegates to make the most of the three days of sessions ahead, describing the conference as a gathering of family focused on the future.
The session moderator, thanking Loginov, picked up on his remark about BPC’s practical rather than academic roots, saying he admired entrepreneurial businesses willing to go out and try things. “Practically testing new ideas, I think is fundamental to the development of anything,” he said, pointing to new payment infrastructure and the growing number of AI agents as areas delegates would explore with guests, panelists and speakers over the next two days. The next speaker on the programme was a representative of Standard Bank.
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