ACI Worldwide and Kwik Payments have gone live on ACI's Payments Orchestration Platform to support digital commerce growth across South Africa and Africa.
The deployment is intended to support the next phase of digital commerce expansion across South Africa and the broader African market.
The go-live marks a further step in ACI Worldwide's expansion across Africa, where the company has been building a network of merchants, PSPs, and merchant acquirers. In addition, the platform connects POS, ATM, and ecommerce channels with global card networks including Visa, Mastercard, and American Express.
Platform capabilities and deployment model
According to the official press release, through the implementation, Kwik Payments enables merchants to manage payments across online, mobile, and recurring channels, with transaction routing across multiple acquirers, payment methods, and geographies. One of the deployment model's stated differentiators is speed: merchants can go live within one to two weeks, compared with the months typically required for traditional multi-provider implementations.
In addition, the platform's fraud detection component evaluates more than 1.000 data points per transaction in real time using AI. On the operational side, AI-enabled reporting and reconciliation tools are stated to reduce manual reconciliation effort by up to 80%. The platform also addresses cart abandonment (a persistent challenge in e-commerce, with abandonment rates cited at up to 70%) by streamlining checkout flows. Kwik Payments has reported conversion uplifts of more than 20% for merchants using the platform.
African digital commerce context
South Africa occupies a significant position in the African payments landscape, functioning as a hub for digital commerce innovation and a stepping stone for regional expansion. Demand from merchants for scalable infrastructure capable of supporting diverse payment methods (including mobile wallets, A2A payments, and digital currencies) continues to grow. Payment orchestration is increasingly positioned as infrastructure that allows merchants to improve authorisation rates, optimise performance, and manage the complexity of operating across multiple markets.
For ACI Worldwide, the partnership with Kwik Payments reflects a broader strategic focus on the Middle East and Africa region. The company has described South Africa as a gateway for innovation and scale within the continent, and the Kwik Payments deployment extends its merchant-facing footprint in the region.
Moreover, for Kwik Payments, the platform provides the technical foundation for its stated growth strategy: scaling from South Africa into broader African markets while maintaining globally competitive payment capabilities for its merchant base.
