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Capitec Bank has agreed to buy South African payments fintech Walletdoc in a deal worth up to R400 million ($23.5 million), betting that owning the rails of online commerce will matter more than simply issuing cards.
The bank will pay R300 million in cash upfront, with a further R100 million in earn-outs over three years tied to performance and Capitec’s share price. For Capitec, the prize is Walletdoc’s full-stack gateway: online and in-app acquiring, instant EFT, payment links and payouts that can be dropped straight into its business-banking machine.
For Leonard Shenker, Walletdoc’s softly-spoken co-founder and CEO, it’s the culmination of a decade building in the background of South Africa’s noisy fintech boom.
Shenker co-founded Walletdoc in 2015 with Dan Wagner, initially as a consumer bill-pay app designed to make traffic fines and utilities as easy as a taxi ride on a smartphone. The Johannesburg-born startup landed early partnerships with EasyPay and Absa, giving it access to hundreds of billers and the validation of a big-four bank while remaining independent.
Before Walletdoc, Shenker spent almost a decade as an executive director at payments company DrawCard, experience he later fused with Wagner’s software and gaming background to build the new venture. He trained as an electrical engineer at the University of the Witwatersrand and later added a professional accounting and finance qualification from the same university - a blend that shows up in Walletdoc’s mix of infrastructure plumbing and commercial pragmatism.
The company formally launched in 2016 and has since processed “billions of rand” in transactions, expanding from bill payments into merchant services, remote card collections and invoice-as-POS tools for SMEs. Along the way, Shenker became a regular voice on payment security and remote commerce, sharing stages with Visa, Absa and other incumbents even as Walletdoc positioned itself as a nimble alternative.
Public filings and company data peg Walletdoc as a 10-year-old business at the time of the deal, with Shenker now likely in his early-to-mid-40s based on his mid-2000s graduation dates - though he doesn’t disclose his age. What is clear is that he’s part of a small cadre of South African fintech founders who have taken a startup from self-funded beginnings, through strategic bank partnerships and VC backing, to a full exit.
If regulators sign off, Capitec is expected to fold Walletdoc’s technology into its broader business offering rather than run it as a standalone brand. That will push Shenker from founder-CEO to corporate operator - and turn one of the country’s more understated fintech builders into a key figure in Capitec’s new merchant-payments push.
