Retrenchments at big South African payments company

Peach Payments is retrenching a number of employees, including senior engineers, MyBroadband has learned.

In addition to the senior staff being retrenched, several DevOps and software engineers were also impacted.

MyBroadband contacted Peach Payments for comment, and CEO and co-founder Rahul Jain confirmed that they had begun the process this week.

“For the first time in its history, Peach Payments has started Section 189 consultations to strengthen the company and realign the business with our objective of achieving profitability in 2025,” Jain said.

Jain and Andreas Demlietner founded Peach Payments in Cape Town in 2012. It is incorporated in Germany as Baobab Payments GmbH and trades as Peach Payments.

“We have set ourselves the goal of becoming a sustainable business while maintaining the service levels merchants have come to expect from us.”

Jain explained that the process started in the week of 7 April 2025. He said all except one of the affected employees had accepted voluntary severance so far.

“These offers include us continuing our contribution to their medical aid plus several months’ salary,” Jain said.

“We are fully supporting our affected team members through this transition and are also working with external recruiters to assist them. The restructure affects approximately 20% of our employees.”

Jain said this was a very difficult decision for the board to reach. “We deeply regret the impact this has on our colleagues,” he said.

“I am confident that this process will help Peach Payments to accelerate our growth so that we can continue to assist African merchants as they grow their businesses alongside ours.”

The layoffs come a week after the company announced it was acquiring West African payment platform PayDunya for an undisclosed sum.

Peach Payments said the acquisition signals its entry into mainland Francophone Africa for the first time. PayDunya operates in six West African Francophone countries: Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Burkina Faso, Togo, and Mali.

“By integrating PayDunya, we are expanding our footprint into the UEMOA and CEMAC regions,” Jain said.

Jain said the acquisition unlocks opportunities for merchants who can now partner with them and access over 450 million people across the markets they operate in.

“Together, we can now offer seamless payment solutions across 12 countries, and we will continue to expand this coverage rapidly,” said Jain.

“This makes the acquisition of PayDunya an obvious step for us, as we expand following our Series A funding round.”

R575-million funding round for Peach Payments

PayDunya was the company’s third major acquisition since concluding a $30-million (R575-million) funding round less than two years ago.

Peach Payments bought in-store payments technology company Exipay in February 2024, followed by software development firm Operativa in July of that year to boost its engineering operations.

The company announced that its Series A funding round was being led by UK-based asset manager Apis Partners through its Apis Growth Fund II in April 2023.

The Competition Commission approved the deal in May, and Peach Payments confirmed in October that the transaction had gone through.

“This funding has been raised to accelerate growth and will be used to build out new products and expand into new countries in Africa,” Jain said at the time.

“We also intend to double down on the markets in which we already have a presence — South Africa, Kenya, Mauritius — to grow market share, expand our headcount and launch new products,” he said.

“All these actions have the core focus of serving our merchants and helping them to scale their businesses.”

With the PayDunya acquisition announcement last week, Jain said that Peach Payments’ success was not in raising the R575-million Series A funding round with Apis.

“Success is in doing the hard work and expanding the business by putting that money to use. We’ve grown a lot and we are rapidly expanding into more countries,” he said.

“Peach Payments’ growth strategy is founded on three pillars: organically growing its existing market share, launching new products and services for merchants and shoppers, and using mergers and acquisitions to facilitate growth.”