The people behind Dragonstone Fintech
Moving money in South Africa is hard, and it is hard by design. Accepting card payments directly means licences, bank sponsorship, security certification, fraud controls and a compliance review that answers upward to a sponsoring bank, to the card schemes and to the regulator. Reaching that takes years and capital almost no small or medium business has, and the review does not get easier for being small.
So almost nobody builds their way past it. They go through somebody who is already inside those relationships, and most of the time that somebody hands over a rate and leaves the rest.
That is the gap we work in. A payment provider hands you a rate and leaves the software to you. A development studio builds the software and leaves the payments to somebody else. The business in the middle is left holding the join, which is where almost all of the difficulty actually lives.
We arrange the payment acceptance and we build what it needs to live inside. One team for both.
How we got here
Matt started out working inside somebody else's payments platform, selling on top of infrastructure he did not control. It was a good way to learn what the work actually is, and a fast way to learn where it goes wrong.
What kept happening was this. A business would come in wanting to take card payments. The rate was never the hard part. The hard part was that they also needed a website that worked, or a booking flow that did not lose people, or a way to reconcile what arrived against what was owed. And the moment the conversation moved past the rate, it stopped being anyone's job.
So we stopped selling on top of somebody else's platform and built the thing we kept wishing existed: one team that writes the software and arranges the payment acceptance inside it, on licensed rails, with one person to call when either half needs attention.
What we are, plainly
We are new. Dragonstone Fintech was registered in 2025, and no client has yet paid us a rand. We would rather tell you that than have you find it out later.
What we can point to is the work, and it is more than it was. Card payments have run on production, including a saved card with 3D Secure, a card on file and an unattended repeat charge. QR has run. A company has been through production onboarding end to end and passed at twenty one checks out of twenty one.
What has not happened yet is money settling into an account of our own, which is a configuration date rather than a gap in what we can do. In a first conversation we will tell you which parts have run and which have not, including the parts sitting in somebody else's queue rather than ours.
The people
Matthew “Matt” Hayward, co-founder and chief executive
Matt runs the commercial side: the offer, the pricing, and the relationship with the licensed partner whose rails everything sits on. He came to payments through the reseller side of the industry and left it because the interesting problem was never the rate.
Most of what we understand about this market came from that: watching businesses ask for a payment rate when what they actually needed was three other things nobody would own. He is studying financial management and marketing at IMM Graduate School.
Alessandro “Ali” Speedie, co-founder and chief technology officer
Ali owns how the product gets built and whether it holds up: the site, the integration work, and the technical side of the payment setup. The part that matters most in practice is that he is the one who checks whether the thing we are about to promise is actually true.
He is studying econometrics and operations research at Maastricht University, and has the habit of modelling something properly before anyone commits to it. He also owns the hardware side of the product and the market work behind it.
Costandino “Dino” Cacouratos, co-founder, chief operating officer and compliance officer
Dino builds the structure the company runs on: its legal form, its governance and its compliance. From the founding documents to the data-protection framework, he built the part that has to exist before a business can reasonably take a young company seriously.
His job is easy to state and hard to do: make sure that when we move quickly, we never cut the corner that matters.
He is studying LLB Law at the University of East Anglia, and he wrote the governance and data-protection framework this company runs on.
The entity
Dragonstone Fintech is the trading name of Dragonstone Ventures (Pty) Ltd, registration 2025/598214/07.
Dragonstone Fintech is not a bank and is not a licensed financial services provider. Payment acceptance is arranged on our licensed partner's rails, and the licence attaches to them rather than to us. We do not hold client funds.
If you are weighing us up, the fastest way to find out whether we are the right fit is to tell us what you are trying to do. A person reads every enquiry and decides.