Serge Belamant is one of the smartest minds in London. Though a France native, he lived in South Africa for the best part of his life from was he was fourteen to 2017 when he stepped down as the CEO of Net Technologies. NET1 was under investigation following claims that the company was involved in corruption with RSA during the award of social grant tender. After learning English, the formal language of SA, he joined high school and then to campus, where he learned some basics in different courses such as Engineering, Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, and Information Systems.
During his early days in the job market, Serge was once applauded to invent applications that were later used in determining water levels in all RSA dams, his first cryptosystems that went public. Before founding NET1 in 1989, Serge Belamant had worked in many organizations where he helped in the most critical areas that needed his help like CSIR, DATABANK, and SASWITCH. Although Net1 Technologies had developed some unique products, its COPAC product was a tremendous breakthrough for the company since it solved fraud issues VISA was facing for many years.
Another product that opened incredible doors for NET1 Technologies was its CPS that it acquired from South Africa’s First National Bank. Then, the system was used to pay social grants around RSA. Serge Belamant embarked on a mission to improve CPS, enabling him to win the next social grant tender with SASSA. Since the grant had attracted many bidders, not all were satisfied with Net1 being awarded the tender. Some like ALLPay filed cases in court against the tender winner, accusing NET1 of bribing the officials.
Also, some NGOs accused NET1 Technologies of using its position in processing the social grants to market its products. These accusations attracted investigation from many agencies, but they all found the accusations to be baseless. Even after this, when Serge Belamant was busy developing his new firm in London, which he started after he left NET1, he came across a publication that linked him with corruption during the social grant award. Belamant was displeased and wondered why the publisher couldn’t use the results of investigations that revealed the truth rather than using the accusers’ false reports. Refer to This Article.