Zaki Farooq, Co-Founder of Payfuture – Interview Series

Zaki Farooq has 22 years of experience leading the Computrad Group, an IT and cybersecurity solutions provider with operations in London, Washington DC, and Dubai. Under his leadership, Computrad delivered mission-critical infrastructure for government agencies and enterprise clients, earning a strong reputation for reliability, security, and technological excellence. This background has given Zaki deep expertise in designing resilient systems, managing complex technology environments, and leading multidisciplinary teams.

At Payfuture, Zaki plays a central role in shaping the company’s technology direction, with a focus on global scalability, advanced infrastructure, and high-performance payment experiences. He works closely across engineering, product, and strategic teams to support the development of future-ready platforms capable of enabling rapid international expansion and adapting to emerging technologies.

PayFuture is a fintech company that provides a unified payment gateway and API to help online merchants accept and send payments across emerging markets with localised payment methods, real-time settlement, fraud protection, and data-rich reporting. The platform connects businesses to popular payment options in regions like Africa, Asia, and Latin America through a single integration, aiming to reduce payment abandonment and open new global revenue streams, often with AI-powered optimisation and risk tools. It also supports cross-border pay-ins and payouts, currency management, and compliance services to make expansion into hard-to-reach markets smoother for e-commerce brands

From your experience building and operating large-scale technology and payments infrastructure across multiple regions, what structural weaknesses did you see in global payment systems when applied to emerging markets, and how did those lessons inform the creation of Payfuture?

Having spent more than two decades building and operating complex technology infrastructure across multiple regions, I’ve seen first-hand how global systems behave under real-world pressure. Running my previous business with offices in London, Washington DC, and Dubai, and delivering IT and cybersecurity solutions to organisations operating at extreme scale, including the United States Military, revealed a consistent pattern: systems that appear robust on paper however become fragmented once they are stretched across borders.

This same dynamic exists in global payments. While the industry presents itself as interoperable and more notably, global, much of the underlying infrastructure remains stitched together and primarily optimised for Western markets, creating friction and failure when applied to emerging economies.

That gap between merchant expectations and the reality of how money actually moves across borders served as the catalyst for starting Payfuture. We set out to build payments from the inside out, beginning with local payment behaviour and infrastructure, then designing cross-border settlement around that reality rather than forcing transactions through legacy models. We wanted to build something that was solving real-world problems for businesses around the globe.

Many global merchants still rely heavily on what are often called card rails—the traditional payment networks that move card transactions through providers like Visa and Mastercard. Why are these systems increasingly insufficient in Africa, Asia, and Latin America?

Card rails were designed decades ago for credit-led economies with high card penetration, stable connectivity, and predictable consumer behaviour. In much of Africa and Asia those assumptions simply do not hold today.

In many markets, cards are either under-penetrated or used very differently. Consumers rely on wallets, instant bank transfers, QR-based payments, or cash-adjacent systems like Fawry in Egypt for example. Forcing those transactions through card networks adds unnecessary cost, latency, and failure points. Declines are higher, fraud rules are poorly calibrated when examined next to local behaviour, and settlement can be slow and opaque.

Cards still matter, but they are no longer the default rail. Merchants that rely on them exclusively are effectively limiting their reach and conversion.

Why are local payment methods—such as bank transfers, wallets, and real-time payment systems—becoming critical for reaching customers in these regions?

Local payment methods align with how consumers already transact and want to transact. They reflect domestic regulation, trust frameworks, and financial inclusion initiatives that have grown organically within each market. They aren’t “alternative” anymore, they are the primary utility.

In India for example, real-time bank transfers are effectively a national utility. In parts of Africa, mobile wallets are the primary financial account, while in Latin America, bank transfers offer a level of trust and familiarity that cards do not always provide.

From a merchant perspective, these methods deliver a triple-win: higher approval rates, lower fraud, and better customer trust. From a systems perspective, they reduce dependency on international card networks and allow payments to clear through domestic rails designed for local volumes and behaviours.

Emerging markets are often described as “fragmented.” At an infrastructure level, what does that fragmentation actually look like when money is moving cross-border?

Fragmentation is a lack of standardisation across every layer of the stack. Different markets operate on different clearing cycles, messaging standards, regulation, FX controls, and settlement rules. Even basic concepts like refunds or chargebacks can behave very differently from one market to another.

When money moves cross-border, it often passes through multiple intermediaries, correspondent banks, and FX conversions. Each hop introduces delay, cost, and operational risk. Visibility is limited while the reconciliation is manual. This makes failures difficult to diagnose.

For businesses operating online, this fragmentation can often culminate in delayed settlements, trapped liquidity, and uncertainty around cash flow, particularly when scaling across multiple emerging markets at the same time. Payfuture addresses this by unifying local payment processing, routing, and settlement visibility within a single infrastructure, reducing the operational friction that’s been created by disconnected domestic systems.

Visa and other incumbents are now moving more aggressively into stablecoins. What does that shift really mean for merchants, and where does payments infrastructure still fall short?

The shift signals that stablecoins are no longer viewed as experimental technology. They offer genuine advantages around speed, transparency, and 24/7 settlement.

This being said though, stablecoins do not solve the entire problem. Merchants still operate in regulated, fiat-based environments. They need compliant on- and off-ramps, predictable treasury flows, and clear regulatory treatment. Without that, stablecoins are at risk becoming another parallel system rather than an integrated solution in my opinion.

The real opportunity lies in bridging regulated stablecoin efficiency with the already-existing regulated financial infrastructure and ensuring merchants are benefiting from faster settlement without taking on this extra operational or compliance risk.

How does PayFuture approach transaction routing differently in markets where reliability, latency, and regulatory variance are constant constraints?

We design routing around outcomes for merchants rather than locking transactions to a single rail or provider. Instead of relying on fixed routes, we prioritise available payment paths based on live performance signals, such as approval rates, latency, and error patterns.

In practice, this means routing transactions across multiple providers, monitoring performance in real time, and applying cascading logic when a route degrades or fails. The objective is resilience. In markets where outages, regulatory changes, or infrastructure constraints are common, static routing creates avoidable risk and lost transactions.

AI is often discussed in abstract terms. Where is AI delivering tangible, measurable improvements today in checkout recovery and conversion rates?

Most immediate impact of AI is in decisioning and optimisation rather than flashy interfaces. We see clear gains where machine-learning models analyse transaction behaviour in real time to adjust routing, retry logic, and fraud thresholds.

For example, identifying when a failed transaction should be retried via a different method, or when friction can be safely removed without increasing risk. These are small decisions individually, but at scale they materially improve conversion and reduce false declines.

The value of AI in payments is cumulative as it compounds quietly in the background.

Compliance has become one of the biggest barriers to scale in fintech. How do you see the current licensing and regulatory arms race playing out, particularly in emerging economies?

We are seeing regulators move faster and become more sophisticated, particularly in emerging markets where digital payments are central to economic growth. Licensing frameworks are tightening, and expectations around safeguarding, reporting, and consumer protection are rising.

This creates a market division. Firms that invest early in compliance infrastructure can scale sustainably. Those that treat regulation more as a box-ticking exercise struggle to expand or face costly remediation later.

Over time, the latter will win. Compliance is no longer a barrier to entry, it is a competitive differentiator. The Genius Act in the USA signed into legislation by Donald Trump in 2025 is paving the way for global change. Merchants now realise that long-term market access is only possible when their partner has a rock-solid regulatory foundation.

What do global merchants most often get wrong when entering markets like Nigeria, India, or Mexico—even after doing their homework?

The most common mistake is assuming that surface-level localisation is sufficient. Translating a checkout or adding a local payment method is not the same as understanding how money settles, how refunds work, or how consumers build trust.

Merchants also often underestimate the operational complexity of these markets, including reconciliation to FX exposure to regulatory reporting and compliance. Success comes from treating each market as a distinct operating environment rather than a variation of an already existing one in your portfolio.

Looking five years ahead, which part of the global payments stack do you expect to remain stubbornly unchanged—and which is most overdue for disruption?

Correspondent banking and cross-border settlement are risk-averse by design and also heavily regulated, so I think that space will be slow to change. What I think is overdue for disruption is how those systems are abstracted for merchants.

Visibility, programmability, and control over cash flow should certainly not be luxuries. I think merchants should know where their money is, when it will arrive, and at what cost, in real time. The future of payments is about making the existing rails we have work more transparently and efficiently for a global, digital economy.