Entersekt, the South African financial authentication company, has named Clare Conway as its Chief Executive Officer. Conway is stepping up from Chief Operating Officer and will take up the role in August 2026, succeeding founder Schalk Nolte, who led the business for seventeen years.
Conway joined Entersekt as Chief Operating Officer, where she was responsible for strengthening the company operating model and tightening execution across its global business. She previously served as Chief Operating Officer of the marketing technology firm Partnerize, and earlier held senior leadership positions at Clavis Insight and Ascential. She is based in Ireland and brings a background in enterprise technology and operational leadership to the top job.
Nolte, who founded Entersekt and served as Chief Executive for seventeen years, is moving into a Founder and Board Member role. In that capacity he will concentrate on market insight, product innovation, regulation and long term strategy, advising the company on the technology and policy shifts reshaping digital finance. The orderly handover keeps the founder close to the business while placing day to day leadership with an operator who has already run the company machine.
Entersekt is headquartered in Cape Town and Stellenbosch and supplies device identity and payment authentication technology to banks, payment networks and fintech companies. Its software is used to verify customers and approve transactions inside mobile banking and payment applications, helping financial institutions reduce fraud while meeting strong customer authentication rules. The company counts financial institutions across Africa, Europe and North America among its customers.
Digital authentication has become one of the more strategically important corners of financial technology. As banking moves almost entirely onto mobile devices, the systems that confirm a customer is who they claim to be, and that a payment is legitimate, have grown from a compliance checkbox into a competitive differentiator. Vendors that can reduce fraud without adding friction to the customer experience are in demand, and that is the space Entersekt occupies.
The appointment marks a familiar moment for a maturing technology company, the shift from founder led vision to operator led scale. Conway inherits a business whose authentication tools sit at the center of a fast growing market, as banks and regulators push for stronger defenses against account takeover and payment fraud. Her mandate, the company said, is to drive disciplined execution and global market growth as Entersekt expands beyond its home market.
For Nolte, the move preserves the institutional memory of a seventeen year tenure while freeing the founder to focus on the longer horizon questions of artificial intelligence, regulation and strategic partnerships. For Conway, the task is to convert Entersekt operational strength into wider commercial reach in a sector where trust and reliability are the product.
