Bots & Bubbles: How AI Is Rewiring Financial Services

Thalia Pillay is the Co-Founder of Orca Fraud, a South African fraudtech company building AI-driven systems to help financial institutions detect and prevent increasingly sophisticated financial crime.

She brings a strong engineering background to the problem, having previously led engineering teams at Stitch, one of South Africa’s leading payments infrastructure companies, where she worked on building and scaling financial systems in production environments.

Thalia developed a deep understanding of banking systems, risk, and regulated financial environments, through her time at Investec as a software developer. She has also held engineering roles at Aerobotics, working on data-driven platforms, and was part of the Women in Engineering programme supporting the development of technical talent in South Africa.

Her work sits at the intersection of machine learning, financial infrastructure, and fraud prevention, with a focus on building systems that can adapt to evolving threats in real time.

Mpho is the Group Managing Director for Merchant Services – Africa at Network International, responsible for strategic planning and execution, business development and value propositions for Merchant partners across the continent.

He also serves as the MD of Payfast by Network, a Network International company and South Africa’s trusted leader in online payment processing.

A payments industry veteran with over 15 years of executive management experience in Financial Services, he has extensive expertise in the management and leadership of product and sales teams and the delivery of payments solutions to wholesale and consumer clients.

Prior to joining Network, Mpho was with BankservAfrica where he served as Chief Product Officer and was a Member of the Executive Team with executive leadership across a number of product verticals including Card, EFT, Realtime Payments, Fraud and Cash Management services. He also previously worked at Nedbank and Deloitte.

Mladen Colic is a financial technology executive known for shaping how data, identity, and technology converge across Africa’s financial ecosystem. As Head of FinTech at TransUnion Africa, he leads the business’s strategy and innovation agenda across digital lending, payments, identity verification, and emerging technologies—working with banks, FinTechs, telcos, and platforms to build the next generation of trust solutions on the continent.

With a career spanning asset management, financial planning, pension fund administration, strategy consulting, privacy-preserving data clean rooms, data ecosystem development, and credit bureau solutions, Mladen brings a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective to solving complex market problems. He has driven transformation across areas such as business unit reinvention, digital process optimisation, bureau data commercialisation, first-party data collaboration, and go-to-market strategy for advanced risk, identity, and credit solutions.

His work focuses on unlocking the power of data and new decisioning frameworks that enable inclusive lending and safer digital ecosystems. He is deeply passionate about privacy-preserving technologies and secure multiparty computation, advocating for models that allow organisations to collaborate on data while protecting identity, intellectual property, and consumer trust.

Mladen holds a BCom Honours in Financial Planning. He frequently speaks on topics including AI in financial services, credit inclusion for SMEs and consumers, data governance, and the future of digital trust—championing an Africa where intelligent, privacy-centric data systems expand economic participation at scale.