David de Villiers is the Founder and Global CEO of Zapper, a locally developed Durban based mobile payments platform that facilitates secure smartphone payments via a QR scanner app and allows its merchants to receive payments from customers by means of scanning a generated QR code.

The company started in 2014 and in just under four years Zapper has grown to operate in 14 countries, employing over 300 people, has 25 000 merchants globally (mostly in the UK and US) and over a One million downloads. The home grown app is one of Durban’s biggest startup success stories. All development, from the software to backend systems, is done in our beautiful city.

David de Villiers was the former Investec Private Bank head of IT, Head of Ecommerce at Derivco and has an MBA from Henley Management School.

What makes this Durban based Zapper even more fascinating is that it is one of the very few South African startups to break into two of the world’s most challenging retail markets, the US and the UK

Currently Zapper has been rolled out in the UK, US, Ireland, France, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Australia, Middle East and Asia..

Recently Zapper has partnered with Alipay - the world’s largest mobile payments platform - created by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. Alipay has over 450 million actives users around the world and the partnership will allow Alipay users to pay at Zapper-affiliated merchants using the Alipay app in South Africa.

One of Davids success stories that due the amazing success of Zapper he was invited to share the stage with Amazon.com's global chief technology officer at a conference last year.