Over R9bn pushed through Pay Shap, Bankserv Africa says

Bankserv Africa, the company responsible for clearing payments between SA’s largest banks, says it has processed over R9bn worth of transactions on its PayShap digital payments platform in the first year of operation.

The company is the largest automated payments clearing house in Africa and processes bank card, ATM and EFT transactions between the country’s banks as part of the SA national payments system.

On Tuesday, Bankserv Africa said the first year of PayShap operation saw over 14-million transactions, with a settlement value in excess of R9bn from March 13 2023 to February 29 2024.

The payments company has been working for years to implement a system that would make it simple for people to send and receive money across banks as part of the SA national payments system.

This is part of a wider plan called the rapid payments programme), which includes crossborder payments.

Together with the Payments Association of SA, Bankserv Africa launched PayShap, which offers consumers cheap access to instant payments across participating banks using cellphone numbers.

Bankserv Africa says the platform promotes “instant, convenient, easy and safe payments” within the transaction limit of R3,000.

More than 2.5-million users have opted into using a ShapID identifier, such a cellphone number, to remove the need to know the beneficiary’s bank account details.

Having initially launched with Absa, FNB, Nedbank and Standard Bank, the service has expanded to include Capitec, Discovery Bank, Sasfin and TymeBank, with African Bank set to be added during 2024.

“As a direct response to the SA Reserve Bank’s Vision 2025 to improve financial deepening by building trust and familiarity with electronic payments, PayShap is fast becoming recognised as a trusted digital peerto-peer payment solution in less than a year,” said Stephen Linnell, CEO of Bankserv Africa.

Linnell hinted at a number of features to be added to the platform in the near future, including request-to-pay.

“To be introduced later this year, request-to-pay will open the PayShap service to small business owners and merchants for the real-time, digital purchase of goods and services,” Linnell said.

“More on this, including the enablement of QR code based acceptance mechanisms, will be shared soon,” he said.