PayShap Sharp Goodbye, bank account details — you can now pay someone with their mobile number
● From this week South Africans can pay by using just their mobile numbers. A new rapid payment service called PayShap is now active, simplifying payments.
After five years of development, BankservAfrica started this method, which is endorsed by the Reserve Bank and will initially work with Absa, FNB, Nedbank and Standard Bank.
Several other banks Capitec, Discovery Bank, Investec, TymeBank, Sasfin and Standard Chartered will follow in a few months. Ultimately everyone with a phone number will be able to make and receive a payment.
Though it is currently linked to a bank account, the potential to open up quick and easy payments using one identifier
a cellphone number is a breakthrough for financial inclusion.
BankservAfrica’s head of real-time payments, Mpho Sadiki, says the payment clearing organisation anticipates this. “In the future, banks will innovate and opt to enable additional digital access channels,” he said at the Joburg launch this week.
The sign-up to create a socalled ShapID is via the apps of the big four banks. It took me a few minutes to sign up on Monday afternoon through my FNB app, which required registering a number and name.
The process of paying with PayShap will be familiar to anyone who has used an ewallet service to send money to another’s cellphone number. Pioneered by FNB over a decade ago, it works because it allows a bank account-holder to send money to someone without one, the bank’s CEO, Jacques Celliers, tells the FM. Another option allows the sender to include an ATM pin, so the cash can be withdrawn from an FNB cash machine.
PayShap opens up this quick way of paying anyone with a cellphone number.
It also adds a layer of privacy to sharing details for getting payments. Instead of sharing your bank account number, you can share your phone number. Additionally, many people use that number as their username without realising it. It is the unique identifier used to sign up with WhatsApp, for instance, while Google and
Microsoft let you log into their cloud services with a mobile number as well as the more traditional e-mail address.
PayPal has effectively proved the case of using nonbank account details to facilitate payments. Any PayPal users can send or receive micropayments via their email addresses.
PayShap updates this for the mobile age where phone numbers are more likely to be your username than your email address.
Right now, it is a pay-only service, but it will be updated to a “request to pay” offering. This is something that PayPal has also used effectively.
The current limit is R3,000 and the banks say it will take just 60 seconds to do the transfer. That alone is noteworthy.