African banks may be able to accelerate innovation by extracting more value from the payment systems they already operate, rather than pouring capital into costly platform replacements.

That was a central theme at the BPC Client Conference 2026 in Cape Town on Wednesday, where bankers, payments specialists and cybersecurity experts explored how financial institutions can unlock more from existing technology while keeping pace with demand for faster digital services.

Jonathan Bautista, Asia-Pacific regional solution director at BPC, a Swiss-based payment technology company that provides digital banking, payment processing and mobility solutions worldwide, argued that modernisation does not have to mean an expensive overhaul.

"One of the key lessons we have learnt in Asia-Pacific is that modernisation does not necessarily mean replacing an entire platform," Bautista told TechCabal on the sidelines of the conference.

Squeezing more out of existing payment infrastructure could allow banks to bring products to market faster, improve customer experiences and enter new markets without the cost and disruption of full platform replacements. With banks already directing substantial budgets into technology, the difference between upgrading and rebuilding a platform can shape how much of that spending translates into customer-facing innovation.

"Technology is important, but modernisation should ultimately be driven by business priorities and opportunities," Bautista said.

African banks are under growing pressure to deliver the speed and convenience customers now expect from digital financial services. Many are investing heavily in technology and stretching beyond traditional banking into adjacent digital services — lenders such as FNB, Capitec, Standard Bank and Nedbank have moved into mobile connectivity — yet the biggest opportunity may lie in making fuller use of the payment systems they already run. Payments are the natural focal point for that effort: they already generate measurable revenue for major lenders and sit at the centre of the digital experience customers judge banks by.

The scale of that investment is already substantial. TechCabal reported that eight major Nigerian banks earned ₦514.82 billion ($386.5 million) from electronic payments in the first nine months of 2025, while six banks spent ₦268.7 billion ($201.7 million) on IT infrastructure in 2024, including core banking upgrades. For bank executives weighing Bautista's advice, those figures frame the underlying calculation — payments income is already material, and the question is how much more value existing platforms can yield before replacement spending comes into consideration.

To the customer, a payment can look like a simple approval or rejection. Behind the scenes, Bautista explained, an issuing platform can evaluate spending limits, fraud risks, customer behaviour and transaction-specific rules. Those capabilities give banks room to build products for distinct customer groups. In an earlier presentation at the conference, he described how existing issuing could support specialised corporate, supplier and procurement cards, with rules tailored to how businesses manage spending.

"Banks need to be able to launch new products quickly, introduce new services, apply different controls for specific customer segments, and integrate effectively with digital channels," Bautista said.

AI-based fraud detection, meanwhile, is becoming increasingly important in digital payments as banks try to flag suspicious transactions without unnecessarily blocking legitimate ones. Nasdaq Verafin's 2026 Global Financial Crime Report estimated that cyber-enabled scams — including phishing, business email compromise and data breaches — caused $14.3 billion in losses in 2025, up 19.6% over two years. In a survey accompanying the report, 90% of financial crime professionals said AI-driven attacks had increased at their institutions over the previous two years.

Payment companies such as Visa already use behavioural analytics to assess transaction risk, a sign of a wider industry shift. BPC is incorporating similar capabilities into its fraud and risk management systems, according to Bautista.

"While a payment platform cannot necessarily prevent a deepfake itself, it can analyse the transaction associated with it and assess whether the activity is consistent with the customer's usual behaviour," he said.

Other AI applications — including transaction approval, routing and switching, and natural-language product configuration — remain in development, he added.

For African banks, the broader opportunity lies in understanding which capabilities their existing payment systems can support and how to connect them to the services customers actually use. Whether corporate and procurement card propositions move from the conference stage into live products — and how quickly AI tools now in development reach production systems — will offer early indicators of how the continent's banks choose to modernise. As demand grows for faster, more flexible digital banking, extracting more value from existing infrastructure may matter as much as buying new technology.