Cloud Migration Acceleration

PayInc, formerly BankservAfrica, is the trusted backbone of South Africa’s payments ecosystem, connecting banks, fintechs, and millions of citizens through secure, real-time transactions.

The Cloud Migration Acceleration Program (CMAP) was launched to modernise this critical national infrastructure by migrating all core, non-core, and enterprise workloads from legacy data centres to the AWS Cloud.

Its goal is to deliver a secure, resilient, and scalable cloud environment that enhances uptime, performance, and cost efficiency while strengthening regulatory compliance and cybersecurity.

By establishing a Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCOE) and adopting automation-first, zero-downtime migration principles, PayInc has built a future-ready cloud foundation that accelerates innovation, ensures operational continuity, and sets a new continental benchmark for payments infrastructure modernisation.

The Cloud Migration Acceleration Program (CMAP) successfully migrated over 100 workloads across mixed infrastructure environments including VMware, physical servers, and databases to the AWS Cloud within 18 months, achieving zero downtime across South Africa’s mission-critical payment systems.

The program delivered a secure, scalable, and compliant cloud platform that modernised PayInc’s national payments infrastructure and significantly enhanced operational resilience.

System performance, visibility, and automation improved markedly, while infrastructure costs and maintenance overhead were reduced.

Beyond technology, CMAP built internal cloud capability across multidisciplinary teams, embedding a culture of agility and innovation.

The result is a replicable model of rapid, secure transformation that balances technology excellence with human capability development, positioning PayInc as a continental leader in digital payments modernisation.

The Cloud Migration Acceleration Program (CMAP) leveraged an extensive suite of AWS Cloud technologies to deliver resilience, scalability, and security across PayInc’s national payments infrastructure. Core services included Amazon EC2, S3, RDS, Redshift, Glue, FSx, Workspaces, and CloudWatch for compute, data, and intelligent observability.

The ecosystem was extended with EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) for container orchestration, API Gateway and Lambda Functions for serverless integration, and Redis for low-latency caching and data performance.

Security and compliance were reinforced through AWS WAF, CloudFront, Shield Advanced, IAM, KMS, and GuardDuty, complemented by PayInc’s enterprise-grade controls ,PAM, Tenable, Darktrace, and Arctic Wolf (integrated SaaS solutions).

Auxiliary systems including AWS Migration Service (MGM), Database Migration Service (DMS), Terraform, Ansible, GitLab, and Jenkins enabled automated provisioning, orchestration, and CI/CD pipelines to ensure precision, repeatability, and operational consistency.

Together, these technologies established a secure, cloud-native payments ecosystem that delivers real-time transaction processing, observability, and operational excellence across South Africa’s financial landscape.

Implementing the Cloud Migration Acceleration Program (CMAP) was exceptionally complex due to its regulatory environment, interbank dependencies, and national significance. Over 100 mission-critical applications and services including EFT, Real-Time Clearing, Settlement, and other regulated systems were migrated to AWS with zero downtime, ensuring uninterrupted payment operations.

The initiative required precise orchestration across 160 specialists and multiple vendors, coordinating parallel streams across infrastructure, applications, data, security, networking, automation, monitoring, and continuity domains.

Each migration was governed by a formal Implementation Approval Plan (IAP), executed on the day of cutover to manage risk and ensure operational readiness. In total, hundreds of migration, testing, and validation activities were meticulously coordinated through structured migration playbooks, supported by automated pipelines and real-time dashboards for performance and compliance assurance.

Despite challenges of legacy dependencies, data gravity, and cross-institution integration, CMAP was completed ahead of schedule, achieving 100% service continuity, ~40% infrastructure efficiency improvement, and zero security incidents — reflecting exceptional technical mastery, governance discipline, and cross-functional execution at national scale.

PayInc, formerly BankservAfrica, is the trusted backbone of South Africa’s payments ecosystem, connecting banks, fintechs, and millions of citizens through secure, real-time transactions. The Cloud Migration Acceleration Program (CMAP) was launched to modernise this national financial infrastructure by migrating all core, non-core, and enterprise workloads from legacy data centres to the AWS Cloud.

The initiative set out to build a secure, scalable, and compliant platform that enhances resilience, agility, and cost efficiency while ensuring uninterrupted payment processing. With over 100 workloads spanning Linux, Windows, VMware environments, databases, applications, and physical hardware, CMAP became Africa’s first full-scale migration of a live financial market infrastructure to the cloud executed in only 18 months with zero downtime.

The program employed a combination of lift-and-shift migrations and new EC2 builds, guided by detailed architecture diagrams for each workload. Dependency mapping, migration playbooks, and waves of work were managed through structured increments and retrospectives. Frequent planning sessions, ways-of-work workshops, and weekly cadence calls facilitated under strong program leadership ensured alignment, visibility, and risk control across 160 specialists.

A transient Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCOE) was established, integrating newly hired cloud engineers with internal experts from infrastructure, application, network, and security teams. An initial team working agreement defined collaboration norms, supported by regular team-building engagements that strengthened cohesion and trust. Bringing together diverse personalities and teams across the organisation, the program maintained alignment and focus while PayInc continued to deliver new initiatives and day-to-day operations.

The program leveraged a comprehensive AWS ecosystem incl EC2, S3, RDS, Redshift, Glue, FSx, Workspaces, CloudWatch, EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), API Gateway, Lambda Functions, and Redis enhanced by an Integrated Observability Program (IOP) and Grafana dashboards for real-time performance insights and proactive issue resolution. Security and resilience were reinforced through AWS WAF, CloudFront, Shield Advanced, IAM, KMS, and GuardDuty, complemented by PAM, Tenable, Darktrace, and Arctic Wolf (integrated SaaS solutions).

Infrastructure automation and orchestration were achieved through Terraform, Ansible, GitLab, Jenkins, and VMware Cloud with AWS Migration Service (MGM), alongside Database Migration Service (DMS) for seamless and secure database transitions. These tools ensured precision, repeatability, and minimal disruption throughout the migration lifecycle.

The result is a secure, high-availability cloud platform underpinning South Africa’s payments ecosystem. CMAP improved performance, observability, and resilience through integrated automation while reducing infrastructure cost and maintenance effort.

Beyond technology, it cultivated multidisciplinary cloud capability and a culture of agility, collaboration, and innovation, positioning PayInc as a continental pioneer in high-velocity infrastructure modernization and setting a new benchmark for regulated financial systems across Africa.

The Cloud Migration Acceleration Program (CMAP) delivers national and regional impact across South Africa and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

As the digital backbone of the national payments system, PayInc connects all major banks, fintechs, and financial institutions processing billions of rands in transactions daily through EFT, Real-Time Clearing, SADC RTGS, and TCIB platforms.

By modernising this ecosystem on the AWS Cloud, CMAP enables secure cross-border interoperability, resilience, and data exchange, enhancing payment accessibility and stability across Africa’s connected digital economy.