Orca Fraud has been selected to join the next cohort of the Visa Accelerator Program, a pan-African initiative designed to support fintech companies building the next generation of payment infrastructure. The program brings together a small group of high-growth companies to work closely with industry experts and ecosystem partners over a 12-week period.

Orca exists to tackle one of the most pressing challenges in modern payments: fraud that is moving faster, coordinating across platforms, and increasingly targeting wallet-first, real-time payment environments.

Now in its fifth cohort, the Visa Accelerator Program supports selected businesses with the resources and expertise to help shape the future of payments across Africa. For Orca, the program offers a structured opportunity to deepen our understanding of card payment infrastructure and apply those learnings to the prevention of fraud at scale.

A shared view of the fraud problem in fast-scaling markets

Across Africa and other emerging markets, digital wallets, mobile money, and instant payments are scaling at extraordinary speed. These systems have expanded access, lowered friction, and brought millions of new users into the formal financial system. At the same time, they have created new attack surfaces. Fraud is no longer confined to a single provider or channel. It spans wallets, banks, remittance platforms, and borders, often moving faster than traditional risk controls can respond.

Orca Fraud was built for this reality. “We develop real-time transaction monitoring technology designed specifically for high-complexity, emerging-market environments, where fragmented data, multiple payment types, and cross-border behaviour are the norm. Orca approaches fraud and financial crime as real-time, systemic risks that require infrastructure-level responses. This enables confident, in-the-moment decisions that build trust without inhibiting growth,” says Carla Wilby, co-founder and CTO of Orca Fraud.

Learning from global standards to shape what comes next

The work Visa has done over decades in building global standards for card risk management makes the Visa Accelerator Program particularly relevant as digital wallets and alternative payment rails become central to everyday commerce.

The program offers Orca Fraud a closer look at how risk decisioning operates at global network scale, shaping how the next phase of digital payments can be built with safety at its core.

The decision to participate was grounded in Orca Fraud’s belief: financial inclusion only scales when digital safety is built into the infrastructure that powers institutions at scale.

“Fraud is one of the least visible but most powerful constraints on financial inclusion,” says Thalia Pillay, co-founder and CEO of Orca Fraud. “When trust breaks, people don’t simply try again. They revert to cash, to informal systems, or they stop participating altogether. Visa has set the global benchmark for how risk is managed at scale, and this program gives us the chance to learn from that experience while contributing what we see on the ground in wallet-first markets.”

“Through the accelerator, we aim to deepen its understanding of digital wallet fraud patterns, explore how predictive risk signals evolve as payments become more real-time and tokenised, and engage with peers and experts across the Visa ecosystem to validate safer payment flows at scale.”

“The focus is not on experimentation for its own sake, but on practical learning that can be applied directly in live environments, helping our clients protect their merchants and users, where the cost of getting fraud wrong is measured in lost trust as much as financial loss.”

Building the foundations for safer growth

As payments infrastructure becomes faster and more interconnected, fraud can no longer be managed in silos. The next generation of fraud and financial crime prevention will depend on shared intelligence, real-time decisioning, and systems designed for the specific realities of emerging markets, rather than retrofitted from elsewhere.

Looking ahead, Orca Fraud sees the Visa Accelerator Program as part of a longer arc: one in which digital payments continue to expand across Africa and the Global South, but do so on foundations that are resilient, adaptive, and worthy of trust. With the right intelligence in place, safety does not have to come at the expense of inclusion or growth.

“Joining the Visa Accelerator Program is a step toward the future we are building for — one where real-time payments are matched by real-time protection, and where progress is reinforced rather than undermined by trust,” ends Pillay.