Nearpays Wins AI for Good Pitch, Heads to Geneva 2026

Nearpays won the AI for Good Innovation Pitch in Johannesburg with its AI-driven Soft POS and will represent Africa at the Geneva summit in 2026.

In Short

Nearpays won the AI for Good Innovation Pitch in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The company pitched its AI-driven Soft POS technology.
Nearpays will represent Africa at the global AI for Good Innovation Summit in Geneva in 2026.

What Happened

Nearpays, a fintech focused on merchant payments, won the AI for Good Innovation Pitch in Johannesburg, South Africa. The win puts Nearpays on a path to represent Africa at the global AI for Good Innovation Summit in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2026.

The company presented an AI-driven Soft POS. Soft POS means a smartphone can act like a card payment terminal (like turning an Android phone into a POS machine) without requiring dedicated hardware. This can reduce the cost of accepting card payments for small businesses, especially merchants that cannot afford or easily access traditional POS terminals.

Nearpays said its approach uses artificial intelligence, which is software that learns patterns from data, to improve how payments are accepted and managed. While the public details shared so far are limited, AI in payment acceptance is often used for fraud detection, transaction risk checks, and smarter merchant tools such as sales insights.

You can find Nearpays on Liners here: Nearpays.

Why It Matters

Pitch competitions are not the same as funding rounds, but they can drive distribution and partnerships. For payment companies, that can be as valuable as cash, because scale often depends on bank relationships, card networks, and large merchant aggregators.

Nearpays also benefits from the timing. Across African markets, Soft POS and tap-to-pay are gaining attention as regulators and payment networks push contactless payments, and as merchants look for cheaper ways to accept digital payments.

If Nearpays uses the Geneva summit slot well, the next steps to watch will be product rollout milestones, partnerships with payment processors and banks, and evidence that the Soft POS solution works reliably across different devices, network conditions, and merchant segments.