The Capitec AWS partnership is not simply about cloud migration. It is a test case for how trust, resilience, and innovation can be re-engineered in South African banking.
Andrew Baker, Capitec’s Chief Technology Officer, speaks with a candour that is rare in financial circles. “There’s absolutely no advantage in taking what you have on-premise and dropping it in the cloud,” he insists. “In fact, it’s quite an expensive thing to do.” Yet that is precisely what Capitec did. The decision was not driven by hype but by a need for greater resilience.
“We believe in N plus one,” Baker explained. “Disaster recovery is not good enough in this day and age. You need to be able to lose a data centre and still have resilience.”
That choice to embrace AWS as the backbone of operations signals a shift not just for Capitec but for the future of digital banking in South Africa. Trust, once measured in the reliability of branches and the transparency of fees, is now measured in uptime, security, and the ability to prevent fraud at scale.
A different kind of migration
Capitec’s decision to embrace AWS stands in contrast to many global banks that approached the cloud as an afterthought or an experiment. “If you don’t know why you’re going to the cloud, you probably shouldn’t,” Baker said. “For us, it was intentional. We knew why we went to the cloud, we knew what we’d get, and that position hasn’t changed.”
The immediate benefit was resilience, but the long-term dividends lie in new ways of handling fraud. “Every single payment that goes through Capitec passes through essentially like a beneficiary firewall,” Baker explained. “That would be impossible on any other infrastructure stack.”
This firewall has become the invisible shield of South African banking. Every transaction, all 25 million Capitec clients across every payment rail, is monitored, flagged, and stored for analysis. If a beneficiary is new, if a scam marker is triggered, or if a suspicious pattern emerges, the payment is paused in real time. “If we see fraud, we’re not letting your payments through,” Baker said.
In one anecdote, a non-Capitec customer downloaded the Capitec app to use as a malware scanner after their banking credentials had been compromised elsewhere. The app flagged and removed the malicious software. “He didn’t even have a Capitec account,” Baker recalled, “but it told him which package needed to be deleted. He used it like a malware removal tool.”
In a country where cybercrime is a daily reality, this matters. Fraud prevention is not theoretical. It is a lived condition of trust.
Trust in downtime
Baker insists trust is not only about fraud. It is also about transparency when things go wrong. He points to the infamous 40-hour outage that Capitec once suffered. “The marketing team did a face of someone that was sad, and that was how we felt. It wasn’t some corporate speech. We were sad. We’d failed.”
It is a small but telling moment. Many banks shield themselves in euphemisms when systems collapse. Capitec chose a human face.
Today, Baker argues, outages of that scale are unthinkable. “Zero-hour downtime. Rolling deployments with zero disruption. A year’s worth of projects delivered in two months.” Stability has become a foundation for productivity. Teams no longer spend nights patching systems at 2 a.m. They deploy during the day, with failback systems ready if telemetry shows issues.
As we’ve previously noted, the pace of delivery in digital banking is no longer just a competitive advantage. It is an expectation. For Capitec, AWS provides the elasticity to meet that demand, compressing timelines and letting engineers focus on innovation rather than firefighting.
Beyond segments
What is striking about Baker’s approach is his refusal to view technology through the lens of client segmentation. “No one asks me to do something for rich people so we can earn more fees,” he said. “All of the stuff we do is free for everyone.” From in-app calling to fraud detection, the services scale across the client base.
This has had unexpected effects. Without targeting high-income customers directly, Capitec has seen significant growth in middle and upper LSMs. Trust, it seems, travels upwards as well as downwards.
At the same time, Baker acknowledges the gaps in South Africa’s financial system, particularly for small businesses. “You will certainly see things Capitec will come out with this year that are fairly innovative in dealing with small businesses and banking them in a way that they haven’t been banked historically,” he hinted.
The sovereignty question
Yet the Capitec AWS partnership raises a larger tension: dependence on a global provider. Outages at the regional level are rare but possible. Critics argue this creates a systemic risk for the financial system. Baker is pragmatic. “Net risk is what matters, not gross risk,” he said. AWS’s architecture, in his view, makes more sense than alternatives.
Microsoft Azure, for instance, replicates between Johannesburg and Cape Town. “We wouldn’t tolerate that,” Baker said. “We want three availability zones right next to each other, five milliseconds apart.” AWS, with its Cape Town presence, met that requirement.
Still, the sovereignty question lingers. The infrastructure of South African banking now rests, at least in part, on the servers of a US multinational. If trust is the currency of modern banking, who ultimately controls the mint?
Banking without crusades
What makes Baker’s philosophy distinct is its rejection of technological crusades. “We don’t do crusades,” he said. “A new CIO comes in and says, ‘I hate mainframes. We must take them out.’ We never do that. We start off with: would the client notice? Would it be better for the client? Would it be better for our staff?”
This pragmatism informs everything from fraud detection to core banking. Capitec has resisted monolithic upgrades that leave other banks stranded in multi-year, multi-billion-rand projects. “At best, at the end of those upgrades, you’re exactly where you were before,” Baker said. “We simplify. We decompose. We don’t bundle.”
It is an approach that echoes Capitec’s original disruption of retail banking, a rejection of legacy costs and opaque structures in favour of simplicity. The cloud, in this view, is not a revolution but a continuation of that ethos.
The architecture of trust
South African banks are often described as technologically advanced compared to peers in developed markets. Fraud prevention tools, mobile adoption, and real-time payments put the sector ahead in many respects. But the Capitec AWS partnership illustrates that leadership is fragile. Fraudsters adapt. Outages erode confidence. Trust is earned transaction by transaction, update by update.
“Stability isn’t a back-end concern,” Baker said. “It’s the front line of client experience.”
The paradox is that the more digital banking depends on global infrastructure, the more important it becomes to localise trust at the point of every payment. Capitec’s firewall, its refusal to accept downtime, its transparent handling of failure — these are not just technical achievements. They are acts of trust-building in a society where trust in institutions is brittle.
The Capitec AWS partnership, then, is not just about the cloud. It is about redefining the infrastructure of belief: the belief that your money is safe, your payment will clear, and your bank will own its failures. For Baker, that is the only crusade worth pursuing.