We’ve been building Ecentric for 28 years. Most of us at this table have been here through the shift from card-present to omnichannel, through the arrival of real-time payments, and through the slow, steady work of becoming a trusted partner to 65% of JSE-listed retailers. That’s not a line we say lightly.
Twenty-eight years is long enough to see an industry change more than once, long enough to make real mistakes and fix them, and long enough to know exactly why we’re still here.
Where we started
Ecentric began in 1998, in a very different payments landscape to the one we operate in today. There was no real-time anything. No wallets, no omnichannel, no conversation about faster rails or instant settlement. Just a small group of people who believed South African retailers deserved a better way to process payments, and who were willing to build it themselves rather than wait for someone else to.
That’s the part of our story we’re proudest of, honestly. Not the scale we’ve reached, but the fact that the people who had that original conviction are largely still the ones in the room. We’ve watched this industry go through cycles most companies don’t survive one of, let alone several, and we’ve come out the other side of each one still building, still improving, still arguing (in the good way) about how to do it better.
Why we’re doing this
We wanted a space to talk about more than the technical detail. Where we see the business going, where we see the industry going, and what twenty-eight years of building payment infrastructure in this market has taught us; the real lessons, not the polished ones. Not a highlight reel. Just our honest view from where we sit, written by us, in our own words.
We also wanted a space that felt less formal than a press release and more like how we talk to each other. Around our own table, disagreement is welcome, certainty is earned, and nobody gets to hide behind a title. We want this blog to feel like that too.
A culture we’ve chosen to stay in
Tenure like ours doesn’t happen by accident, and it isn’t just loyalty for its own sake. It happens because of how it feels to build something here. We’ve been through hard years together the kind that test whether a leadership team trusts each other or just tolerates each other and we came out the other side closer, not further apart. That’s not something you can manufacture with a mission statement. It’s built one hard decision at a time, over years.
That shared history shows up in small ways every day. It’s why we can disagree openly in a room without it becoming personal. It’s why a hard call gets made faster, because we’re not starting from scratch on trust every time. It’s why, when something breaks, the instinct is to fix it together rather than point fingers. None of that is glamorous. All of it matters.
We’re genuinely proud of what we’ve built, and even more proud of who we’ve built it with.
What to expect from us
This is where we’ll keep sharing that view, honestly and without much polish, where we and the industry are heading, what we’re getting right, what we’re still figuring out, and what 28 years of doing this has actually taught us.
