Cloud Migration Acceleration

PayInc, formerly BankservAfrica, operates South Africa’s national payment infrastructure, connecting banks, fintechs, and millions of citizens through secure batch and real-time transactions. The Cloud Migration Acceleration Program (CMAP) was launched to modernize this critical national infrastructure by migrating all core, non-core, and enterprise workloads from legacy data centres to AWS Cloud.

The program’s goals were 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 transient Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCOE) and adopting an architecture-led, risk-mitigated migration approach, PayInc built a future-ready cloud foundation that accelerates innovation, ensures operational continuity, and sets a new continental benchmark for payments infrastructure modernization across Africa.

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 and Prisma Cloud (integrated SaaS solutions).

Auxiliary systems  including AWS Migration Service (MGM), Database Migration Service (DMS), Terraform, Ansible, GitHub, ArgoCD 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 batch and real-time transaction processing, observability, and operational excellence across South Africa’s financial landscape.

Implementing CMAP presented exceptional complexity due to regulatory environment, interbank dependencies, and national significance. Over 100 applications including mission-critical systems such as EFT, Real-Time Clearing, Settlement, and SADC RTGS required migration while maintaining seamless service continuity—any extended disruption would impact national payment processing.

The initiative required precise orchestration across 160 internal professionals and 100+ external stakeholders including multiple banks, financial institutions, and technology vendors. Each stakeholder maintained unique connectivity requirements that had to function seamlessly throughout migration, requiring comprehensive UAT validation before production cutover.

Each migration was governed by formal Infrastructure Assessment Plans executed during strategic maintenance windows to minimize business impact. The program leveraged active-active architecture across Selby and Randburg sites with rollback capability to manage risk.

Additional complexity came from executing transformation while maintaining operational stability AND delivering new business initiatives in parallel—balancing competing organizational priorities without compromise.

Despite these challenges, CMAP completed 8 months ahead of schedule (October 31, 2025 vs. June 2026 target) with zero extended service disruptions, zero security incidents, and 100% stakeholder connectivity maintained—reflecting exceptional technical mastery, governance discipline, and cross-functional execution at national scale.

PayInc operates South Africa’s national payment infrastructure, processing billions of batch and real-time transactions annually for banks, financial institutions, and consumers across the country and Southern African Development Community (SADC) region.

The Cloud Migration Acceleration Program (CMAP) was launched to modernize this critical infrastructure by migrating all workloads from legacy data centres to AWS Cloud.

Strategic Approach - Three-Phase Execution:

• Phase 1 (Base Capabilities, 2023) defined cloud strategy and established governance frameworks.

• Phase 2 (Strengthening and Scaling, April 2024-June 2025) represented the core migration period, with 100+ workloads migrated including the complex data warehouse transformation involving 184 billion Datawarehouse transactions.

• Phase 3 (Accelerating and Embedding, July-October 2025) emphasized performance optimization, achieving 100% migration completion on October 31, 2025—eight months ahead of the original June 2026 target.

Organizational Excellence:

CMAP’s success stemmed from exceptional program coordination across eight specialized domains: Infrastructure (Linux, Windows, VMware migration), Applications (EFT, RTC, SADC RTGS, Settlement systems), Data (RDS, Redshift, Glue, DMS), Security (IAM, KMS, GuardDuty, WAF, Shield Advanced, PAM, Tenable, Darktrace, Arctic Wolf), Networking (VPC design, Direct Connect, interbank connectivity), Automation (Terraform, Ansible, GitLab, ArgoCD, Jenkins), Monitoring (CloudWatch, Grafana, Integrated Observability Program), and Continuity (IAPs, incident response, cutover rehearsals).

The CCOE provided orchestration across these domains, ensuring consistent execution standards, knowledge sharing, and rapid issue resolution. This embedded approach built organizational capability rather than creating dependency on external consultants.

Innovation and Risk Mitigation:

Rather than simple lift-and-shift, CMAP employed architecture-led migration patterns optimizing workloads for cloud-native capabilities. Understanding that complex migrations encounter challenges, the program incorporated comprehensive risk mitigation including Infrastructure Assessment Plans with defined rollback windows, active-active architecture across Selby and Randburg sites enabling seamless failover, strategic scheduling during maintenance windows, and rigorous User Acceptance Testing of stakeholder connectivity before production cutover.

When production complexities arose during certain cutovers, the IAP framework enabled controlled responses within planned windows, preventing extended service disruptions. This realistic planning and transparent communication-maintained stakeholder trust throughout.

Parallel Excellence:

Unlike organizations that pause innovation during transformation, PayInc maintained operational stability while delivering new business initiatives concurrently with cloud migration—demonstrating exceptional organizational discipline and resource management.

National Impact:

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, providing a proven methodology and replicable blueprint for other financial institutions considering similar transformations across the continent.

CMAP delivers national and regional impact across South Africa and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

As the digital backbone of South Africa’s 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 modernizing this ecosystem on AWS Cloud, CMAP enables secure cross-border interoperability, resilience, and data exchange, enhancing payment accessibility and stability throughout Southern Africa’s connected digital economy.

The program’s impact extends beyond South Africa’s borders, establishing a replicable blueprint for financial infrastructure modernization across the African continent. As Africa’s first full-scale live financial market infrastructure cloud migration, CMAP demonstrates the feasibility of transforming critical national payment systems while maintaining operational continuity, positioning PayInc as a continental leader in digital payments innovation.