Announcing the cohort, Visa said the programme focuses on FinTechs building solutions aligned to Visa’s core priorities, including money movement, cross-border payments and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.

The fifth cohort reflects two dominant trends across African FinTech: growing emphasis on money movement, cross-border use cases and AI-driven solutions addressing risk management, identity verification, fraud prevention and credit scoring.

Orca naturally aligns with this focus. They’re building an AI-driven fraud and risk platform aimed at financial institutions, addressing losses associated with real-time and digital payments. 

Rather than operating at the consumer layer, Orca positions itself as infrastructure for banks and payment providers, a segment that has gained increased attention as transaction volumes and instant payment adoption rise across the continent.

Petl Pay, formerly Rafiki OS, enters the accelerator following its spin-out from Rafiki Works, a platform focused on specialist talent and distributed work across Africa. 

According to founders Greg Cooke and Nicholas Boswell, Petl Pay originated as an internal system designed to manage complex workflows such as project approvals, invoicing and payouts across fragmented teams.

That internal infrastructure has since been productised into a standalone payments and workflow platform. Currently in private beta, Petl Pay is becoming the primary focus as Rafiki Works continues to operate independently.

South African startups have featured consistently across previous cohorts of the Visa Africa Fintech Accelerator. Alumni from earlier intakes include Floatpays, Franc, Open, Ordev, Sticitt, Truzo and Zazu.

The recurring theme among these companies has been a focus on specialist infrastructure rather than broad consumer-facing FinTech products, spanning areas such as education payments, escrow services, developer tooling and SME banking.

Visa has positioned its Africa Fintech Accelerator as a strategic programme rather than a traditional early-stage accelerator. 

Participating startups gain access to Visa’s technical resources, commercial networks and enterprise relationships across banks, merchants and payment providers. 

For infrastructure-focused companies, the programme offers potential distribution pathways that are difficult to access independently.