The Payments Knowledge Base

Payments,
end to end.

Every payment mode — cash, cards, acquiring, issuing, SoftPOS, A2A, mobile money, wallets, crypto, stablecoin — across South Africa, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. The regulation and compliance that govern them, the training that certifies the people, and AI agents, powered by 2nth.ai, that help payments professionals do the work.

One knowledge base. Read it, load it, act on it.

Built for payments executives, consultants, PSPs, banks' payments teams, PayInc, and the wider ecosystem. Every node is a reference a human reads, context an agent loads, and a surface an agent acts on — kept current by domain experts.

01
Read
The practitioner reads the explainer — the mode, the rail, the regulation, the cost of getting it wrong.
02
Load
An agent loads the node as context — edge models by default, frontier APIs for partners.
03
Act
Agents advise, draft, screen, and tutor across modes, rails and regions — for execs and consultants.
04
Moderate
A research agent proposes updates; payment domain-expert partners review and approve before anything ships.

Six branches. The whole payments stack.

Modes, rails, compliance, regions, training and agents — the structure every payments build, advisory and certification is grounded in. Live branches link through; the rest land on the moderated review cadence.

Live · 17
💳

Modes

Every way value moves — cash, cards & EMV, issuing, acquiring, POS & SoftPOS, QR, account-to-account & instant, open banking, mobile money, wallets, cross-border, crypto, stablecoin, CBDC, BNPL, direct debit, payouts.

Acquiring SoftPOS Issuing A2A & instant Stablecoin
Live · 6
🚂

Rails & infrastructure

The plumbing under the modes — card schemes, ISO 20022 & ISO 8583 messaging, switching, clearing and settlement, and network tokenization.

Card schemes ISO 20022 Switching Settlement Tokenization
Live · 9
🛡️

Compliance

The rules you cannot ship without — PCI DSS 4.0.1, PIN & P2PE, AML / CFT, sanctions screening, KYC / CDD, fraud, 3-D Secure & SCA, disputes, and data protection (POPIA / GDPR).

PCI DSS 4.0.1 AML / CFT 3DS & SCA FATF POPIA
5 regions · 23
🌎

Regions

Local reality, not generic theory — South Africa (SARB, PayInc, PayShap, RTC, the PASA sunset), wider Africa (PAPSS, mobile money), the Middle East (SAMA, CBUAE, Buna) and Europe (PSD3, SEPA, MiCA).

South Africa Africa Middle East Europe Global
Live · 7
🎓

Training & certification

The people side of a regulated industry — FAIS Key Individual & Regulatory Exams, PCI and AML / FIC tracks, scheme certification, and AI tutors that quiz and track against the curricula.

FAIS KI RE exams CPD PCI training AI tutoring
Live · 7
🤖

AI & agents

Powered by 2nth.ai — role agents for payments execs and consultants, and the research & regulatory-watch agent that keeps this whole tree current under partner moderation.

Exec agents Consulting Research agent Edge models Partner APIs

Two readers. One tree.

The same content serves the payments professional learning and the agent operating — with a human-in-the-loop on every change to the knowledge itself.

For professionals

Advise and certify

Role agents that support payments executives and consulting work — strategy, compliance, acquiring product, and diligence — grounded in this knowledge base, not generic training data.

  • Payments strategy & rails-selection advisor
  • Compliance & FAIS Key Individual advisor
  • Acquiring / PSP product agent
  • Consulting analyst for diligence & benchmarking
For the knowledge base

Research, propose, moderate

A research agent watches the regulators and the rails — SARB, PayInc, PCI, FATF, PSD3, MiCA, SAMA, CBUAE — and drafts updates as pull requests. Nothing ships until a domain-expert partner approves.

  • Continuous regulatory & market monitoring
  • Proposed updates opened as moderated PRs
  • Edge models by default; Gemini / Claude APIs for partners
  • Every Live leaf carries a reviewer & review date
payn

A payment mode is never alone — acquiring needs a scheme, a scheme needs settlement, settlement answers to a regulator, and the regulator changes the rules. The tree connects them, and the agents traverse the whole thing.

Choose your depth

Reference content is open. Decision content, agent depth, and frontier-model tasks compound for members and partners.

Open

Explore

The reference tree and the agent-fetch API. Read it, load it into your own agent, ask the edge-model agents.

  • All reference explainers
  • Mode, rail & region maps
  • Agent-fetch API (/api/context)
  • Edge-model agents (Cloudflare Workers AI)
Browse the tree
Partner

Moderate

Payment domain experts who review proposed changes, plus frontier-model APIs for deep, ad-hoc work on the site.

  • Everything in Build
  • Review & approve research-agent PRs
  • Gemini / Claude APIs for deep tasks
  • Co-branded leaves & named reviewer credit
Request Partner intake →