SpoorPay.
Automating cross-border payment compliance for agricultural exporters.
The problem
South African agricultural exporters — wine farms, co-ops, fruit producers — regularly receive cross-border payments from UK and European buyers. Every one of those payments must be declared to the South African Reserve Bank as a Balance of Payments transaction. Currently that means someone at the farm or co-op manually logging into their bank, finding the payment, and filing the declaration themselves.
It's slow, error-prone, and nobody's idea of a good use of time. For small and mid-sized exporters without a dedicated finance team, it's a genuine operational burden.
At the same time, traditional cross-border payment rails are slow. SWIFT transfers can take days. There's no real-time visibility into where a payment is, and reconciliation is painful.
The opportunity
Stablecoins offer something traditional banking can't: speed, transparency, and full payment traceability from buyer to seller in real time. Every transaction is visible on-chain. Settlement happens in minutes, not days.
The challenge is compliance. South African exporters can't just receive stablecoin payments and call it done — the SARB declaration requirement still applies. The opportunity with SpoorPay is to make stablecoin payments viable for this market by automating the compliance layer that sits around them.
What I designed
SpoorPay is a design and research project exploring how stablecoins and open banking could be combined to automate SARB Balance of Payments compliance for South African agricultural exporters. The visual MVP is live at spoor-settle-hub.lovable.app and demonstrates the core payment and compliance flow.
The integrations with TrueLayer, Bridge.xyz, and VALR are architectural decisions based on research into what the compliance layer would require, not live implementations. The next stage is building the relationships and technical foundations to take it further.
Why it matters for my practice
SpoorPay is proof that I'm not just designing products that touch DeFi — I'm building one. The problem is real, the regulatory complexity is genuine, and the solution requires the same kind of compliance-first thinking I've applied at every regulated fintech I've worked with.
It's early. But it's real.