Think about the last time you paid a person rather than a shop. A plumber, a hairdresser, someone’s cousin who fixed your gate. You almost certainly did not reach for a card. You asked for their number, opened your banking app, and the money was there before they finished saying thanks.
That habit is not new. FNB launched eWallet in 2009 and South Africans have been sending money to cellphone numbers ever since, through cash sends, instant EFT and whatever their bank decided to call it. What we never had was one system that worked between all the banks, cheaply, without anyone needing a card.
That’s what changed. PayShap has now processed more than 905 million transactions, with monthly volumes accelerating to roughly 89 million against an average of about 14 million a month across its first three years. Twelve banks are on board and the Reserve Bank bought half of the company that runs it.
The number worth your attention is the average payment, which has fallen to about R498. That isn’t people settling rent. That’s people buying things.
The money moved. Your website didn’t.
Now go and look at how your business takes payment online. If you’re typical, there’s a card form. Maybe an EFT option with your banking details and a polite request to send proof of payment, which is a sentence that should embarrass all of us.
Meanwhile the customer sitting on your page pays for almost everything else in their life by tapping a phone number in their banking app. You’re asking them to fetch a physical card, type sixteen digits, find the expiry, find the CVV, then wait for a one-time PIN from a network that may or may not deliver it this decade.
Every one of those steps is a place where somebody gives up. Checkout abandonment isn’t usually a change of heart. It’s friction, and friction is a design choice you made without realising you were making it.
What actually changed this year
Every version of paying by phone number, from eWallet onwards, was built for paying humans. That’s shifted. PayShap Request now lets a business send a payment request straight to the customer’s banking app, where they approve it and the money settles instantly.
Look at what that removes. No card details to capture, so no card-not-present fraud on the transaction. No card interchange skimmed off the top. No waiting days for settlement while you carry the cost. The customer does the thing they already do fifty times a month and you get paid before they’ve closed the tab.
This direction isn’t accidental either. The Reserve Bank’s payments modernisation programme has been pushing it since late 2025, and the playbook is borrowed from Brazil’s Pix and India’s UPI, where merchants were converted first and consumers followed because the option was suddenly everywhere.
Nobody is claiming it’s finished
Being honest about this matters more than selling it. BankservAfrica has openly acknowledged that transaction fees and wildly inconsistent experiences between banking apps have held adoption back. Registering a ShapID before your first payment is real friction, and only around six million people have done it. Some banks charge you to move your own money, which in 2026 takes a certain confidence.
So this isn’t a case for ripping out your card gateway. Plenty of your customers still want to pay by card and should be able to. It’s a case for not offering exactly one way to pay in a country that has spent fifteen years getting comfortable with another one.
This is a conversion problem, not a finance one
Payment methods get filed under admin, somewhere near the accountant, which is why they go unexamined for years. That’s the mistake. Checkout is the last three metres of every marketing rand you’ve ever spent.
Follow the logic from the last month of these posts. Google sends you fewer visitors now, and the ones who arrive are further along and more likely to buy. Most of them are on a phone. They found you, they liked what they read, they decided, and then your website handed them a form designed for a laptop and a wallet. Losing them there is the most expensive way to lose them, because you’d already paid for everything that got them to that point.
Adding a payment method is a small technical job. Almost every serious South African payment provider supports this now, and it usually amounts to switching something on and testing it properly on a phone.
The Tuesday test
Take your own phone, open your own website, and buy something from yourself. Or send yourself an invoice and pay it. Time it, and count how many times you have to leave the page to find something.
If the answer involves standing up to fetch your wallet, your customers are doing the same thing, and some of them aren’t sitting back down.
If your checkout still assumes it’s 2015, we can bring it forward.