JSE and Nasdaq-listed Lesaka Technologies is rebranding Kazang Insights as Lesaka Data & Insights, folding it into a consolidated Merchant Division alongside Kazang, Connect, Adumo and GAAP.

The unit was built out of Touchsides, which Lesaka bought from Heineken in 2024. It sells near-real-time visibility into SKU-level sales, basket composition, actual shelf prices, stock availability and promotion performance across the informal market, to FMCG brands, wholesalers and financiers.

The number that matters is 90,000. That is how many spaza shops and taverns sit on Lesaka's point-of-sale network, alongside 10,500 checkouts. NIQ puts the traditional trade universe at roughly 150,000 outlets against about 10,000 in modern retail, so Lesaka already sees a majority of the channel. Set that against the state's own visibility.

Government's spaza registration drive drew about 82,000 registrations by the February 2025 deadline, verified 44,696 of them and issued roughly 15,000 trading permits. A private fintech has better live sight of informal retail than the department responsible for it.

The commercial case is the gap being filled. Informal retail turns over an estimated R190-billion a year, and NIQ recorded R43.1-billion in traditional trade sales in the first quarter of 2026 alone, while modern trade unit sales grew 1.7%. Most existing data on the channel is modelled or sampled and lands weeks late.

ITWeb reported the rebrand and Roland Naidoo's argument that surveys and historical samples cannot keep pace with a channel where pricing and availability shift daily. ITWeb's results coverage showed the Merchant Division lifting net revenue 46% to R3-billion while the group carried a R1.6-billion net loss. BusinessTech, citing NIQ, documented traditional trade outgrowing the listed chains on volume.

This is a good business and an uncomfortable one. Lesaka put terminals into 90,000 shops to process payments, and the exhaust from those transactions is now a second product, sold to the brands whose goods sit on those shelves. The shopkeepers produce the asset.

Lesaka says it plans to develop models letting participating shops share in the value generated, with no date and no mechanism attached yet. That sentence is the one to watch, because it is the difference between a data business and a data extraction business.

The structural lesson for founders is simpler. Your payment rails are a measurement layer, and the measurement is often worth more than the processing fee. Work out what your transaction data is worth before somebody else does.

You might also like our piece on Yoco's SME operating system making the same move in payments, how Shoprite's market cap doubled chasing this exact shopper, and why SA enterprise AI adoption keeps outrunning what anyone can measure.

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