South African online retail will hit roughly R159-billion this year. That is about 22.5% growth on 2025, and the first full calendar year where online accounts for around 10% of national retail turnover.

Put that in perspective. The market will add about R29-billion in a single year. That is almost the size of the entire South African online retail market in 2020, which came in at R30.2-billion. Meanwhile the broader retail sector is growing at about 4% in nominal terms.

The profitability picture has changed too. Takealot Group posted its first full-year trading profit fifteen years after launch. Pick n Pay’s online business was profitable for a second year running, with turnover up 32.7%. Checkers Sixty60 grew 34.5% to R25.5-billion. TFG Africa’s online sales grew 49.2% and now make up 8.2% of divisional sales.

So the “will South Africans shop online” question is settled. Which means the interesting question has moved somewhere else, and it has landed squarely in payments.

The number that should worry all of us

79.1% of South African adults have internet access. Only 34.2% shop online.

And that second number went down, from 36.6% the year before.

This is not a demand problem. Existing online shoppers are simply buying more, which is why turnover is up a third while the shopper base narrowed. But it tells you the growth is coming from deepening an already-converted base rather than bringing new people in. 

The gap is starkest at the bottom of the income curve. Among LSM 3–6 consumers, 70.4% have internet access and 23.9% shop online. Among LSM 7–8, it is 84.2% and 36%. More than 60% of adults in households earning R40,000-plus shop online, and penetration hits 75.4% in the highest socio-economic segment. Women have higher internet access than men (80.5% vs 77.6%) but lower online shopping penetration (31.7% vs 36.9%).

South Africa does not have a connectivity shortage. It has a conversion gap. And a meaningful slice of that gap is checkout design.

Payments stopped being the bottleneck. That is the point.

Here is the thing that has genuinely shifted, and it is the finding we keep coming back to internally.

Retailer satisfaction with payment providers sits at 92%. During the 2025 Black Friday weekend, PayInc cleared an average of 934 transactions a minute. Peach Payments alone processed more than R1.86-billion across Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

The rails work. The infrastructure held. The constraint has moved from can this payment complete to will this customer choose to complete it.

Practically, it means the customer paying with prepaid data on an entry-level Android is the growth market, not an edge case. 57.9% of online shoppers use a smartphone, more than double the 26% on laptops, and browsers still beat apps in 42 of the 48 categories measured. So pages have to load on a constrained connection. Payment options have to be ones the customer already recognises. And the checkout has to recover cleanly when signal drops halfway through a 3DS redirect, because it will.

This is why we built Embedded Express, letting customers pay with a digital wallet straight from the product page before they ever reach a checkout. Fewer steps, less to abandon.

The payment mix has fragmented, and adding every logo is the wrong answer

Five years ago you could describe the South African checkout in one word: card. Not anymore.

Card is still the base layer. But pay-by-bank and instant EFT now carry serious volume, with 40.8% of retailers offering Instant EFT or PayShap. Capitec Pay on its own accounts for 40% of payment value across some processors. Digital wallets grew more than 34% year on year. And Buy Now Pay Later has found its natural range at R800 to R8,000, where it demonstrably lifts conversion and basket size. Below about R300 it adds nothing at all.

The smart move is orchestration. Route each transaction to the method most likely to complete it for that customer, on that device, at that basket size. Fewer visible choices, better matched.

It is also worth watching the Reserve Bank’s Payments Ecosystem Modernisation programme. The activity-based framework being built there will let retailers and fintechs participate more directly in payment activity. If you run a large loyalty ecosystem, that is a strategic question for this year’s roadmap, not a 2029 one.

Trust is the slower curve

One finding should keep everyone in this industry honest.

Comfort with the mechanics of online shopping is improving. Mobile-app comfort rose from 14.5% to 18.1%. But only 20.7% of online shoppers strongly agree that entering their personal details online is safe, and 17.6% strongly agree that online purchases are secure. Concern about financial information being stolen has barely moved.

Tokenisation is one of the quiet wins of the last few years: the customer’s actual card details never touch the merchant’s systems, and the customer gets a one-tap repeat purchase out of it.

Two things coming faster than most roadmaps assume

Subscriptions have become the battleground. Amazon Prime launched locally in June at R59 a month. Shoprite’s Xtra Savings Plus offers unlimited free delivery for R99. TakealotMORE passed 25% of group GMV within two years. Every one of those puts recurring authorisation, stored credentials and failed-renewal recovery at the centre of retail economics. If your involuntary churn from expired cards is invisible to you right now, that is revenue leaving quietly.

AI has arrived at the interface. ShopriteX put Pixie inside Sixty60 in April. Pick n Pay launched Penny on asap! in July, letting customers build a basket by voice note or photo. Globally, AI-referred retail traffic is up 805% year on year. Right now these assistants help build the basket. Fairly soon customers will expect them to finish the job, and no South African retailer yet lets an external AI agent complete a purchase through an API.

When that changes, the payment layer will need to authorise a transaction that no human is watching. Safely, reversibly, with clear consent and a clean audit trail. The merchants thinking about that now will move considerably faster than the ones who wait.

What we’d actually do with this report

If you run an online business in South Africa, three things:

1. Audit your checkout on a cheap phone on a bad connection. Not your iPhone on office wifi. Time it. Count the steps. Find out where shipping cost first appears.
2. Consider which payment methods suit your target market and start routing them. Match method to customer, device and basket size, and measure completion rate per combination rather than per method.
3. Look at your collection economics. More than 55% of Mr Price online orders are collected in store, and Shoprite has pushed Sixty60 into selected Shoprite stores. For the next cohort of shoppers, a delivery fee on a small basket is often the whole objection.

The through-line across all our 11+ markets is the same. Growth comes from the customers you are currently losing at the last screen, not the ones you are already converting.

There are 65% of connected South African adults who don’t shop online yet. That is the market.

Download the full report here

.<\/p>]]> https://www.peachpayments.com/scale/meet-tegan-turning-risk-into-a-growth-enabler/ Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:14:14 +0000 https://www.peachpayments.com/?p=22232

How a proactive risk management philosophy and structured onboarding framework empower merchants to trade safely across Africa.

In digital commerce, payment processing often feels like balancing on a tightrope. Merchants need seamless, instant checkout experiences for their customers, yet they must continuously defend against financial crime, fraud, and complex regulatory requirements. For many businesses, navigating this balance feels overwhelming.

At Peach Payments, solving this exact operational complexity is driven by Tegan Borchert, Director of Risk & Onboarding. By reframing risk management from a rigid administrative barrier into a supportive security mechanism, Tegan and her team enable merchants—from local SMEs to regional enterprises—to expand confidently without sacrificing security.

1. Friction-Free, Risk-Aware Merchant Onboarding

Merchant onboarding is often where business momentum stalls. Strict compliance requirements can lead to unnecessary delays or blanket rejections. Tegan’s approach balances rigor with commercial reality.

Peach Payments implements a structured, multi-step risk assessment that evaluates each business based on its legal entity structure, industry, operational model, and geographic footprint:

• Know Your Customer (KYC/KYB) & Sanctions Screening: Verifying legal entities, directors, and ultimate beneficial owners against PEP (Politically Exposed Persons) and global sanction databases.
• Business Model & Web Content Analysis: Reviewing merchant product lines, pricing consistency, and terms to ensure compliance with card scheme rules (e.g., Visa and Mastercard regulations).
• Pragmatic Risk Decisioning: Rather than issuing flat declines to higher-risk business models (such as Drop Shipping), Tegan’s team frequently provides alternative pathways. For instance, where appropriate, the team can explore alternative payment or onboarding pathways for businesses that do not initially fit standard card-processing risk criteria. 

This proactive flexibility ensures legitimate businesses can go live quickly while safeguarding Peach Payments and its merchant ecosystem against fraudulent entities.

2. Multi-Layered Security and Real-Time Protection

Once a merchant is live, transaction monitoring becomes the primary line of defense. Tegan oversees an integrated security layer that mitigates fraud behind the scenes without disrupting authentic buyers:

• 3D Secure (3DS) Integration: Using 3DS authentication where required helps reduce unauthorised card fraud and, where the applicable liability-shift conditions are met, can shift liability for qualifying fraud disputes from the merchant to the issuer. 
• Automated Fraud Checks: Utilizing real-time IP tracking, BIN (Bank Identification Number) validation, and card blacklists to block suspicious payment attempts automatically.
• Custom Operational Rules: Merchants can deploy tailored risk controls, such as velocity checks (limiting payment retry rates) and plausibility checks (detecting geographic mismatches between card issues and checkout locations).
• Real-Time Transaction Monitoring: Combining transaction-level risk signals, rules, operational monitoring and fraud intelligence to identify suspicious activity and emerging fraud patterns. 

3. Protecting the Bottom Line: Chargeback Management

Uncontrolled chargebacks pose a fatal risk to online merchants, as exceeding card scheme thresholds can trigger monitoring, remediation requirements and potentially restrictions on processing. .

Under Tegan’s leadership, Peach Payments maintains an active dispute and chargeback management team that works directly with merchants and acquiring banks. By analyzing chargeback trends, assisting with evidence collation, and pre-screening high-risk daily settlements, Peach Payments maintains an aggregation chargeback ratio significantly below industry penalty thresholds.

4. Enabling Pan-African Expansion via “One API”

As Peach Payments expands across Africa, merchants face a fragmented landscape of payment methods, regulatory nuances, and regional fraud profiles.

Rather than treating risk as a localised barrier, Tegan works alongside growth teams to position risk controls as an enabler for regional scale. By offering a consolidated “one API” integration backed by standardized risk management, merchants can launch into new territories like Kenya or Mauritius with enterprise-grade security infrastructure already built in.

Security as a Competitive Advantage

Risk management doesn’t have to mean friction. Through structured onboarding, active chargeback protection, and flexible security tools, Tegan Borchert and the Risk & Onboarding team ensure that Peach Payments merchants can focus on what matters most: growing their business safely.

A Career Built at the Intersection of Technology, People, and Problem-Solving

Chanelle didn’t set out to work in payments. Like a lot of people in the industry, she ended up there almost by accident – and stayed because the work turned out to be more human than she expected.

“It’s an intersection of technology, problem-solving, and people,” she says of the industry. That framing matters, because it’s easy to assume payments work is purely technical: gateways, integrations, reconciliation, compliance. But for Chanelle, the real measure of a good solution isn’t how sophisticated it is on the backend – it’s whether the customer ever has to think about it.

“A technically impressive solution is worthless if it creates friction for the user,” she says. Staying close to the customer, in her view, is non-negotiable. It’s the difference between a payment gateway that just works and one that quietly becomes a source of frustration nobody bothers to fix – which is also why she’s glad to see partners like Peach Payments building infrastructure with that same customer-first philosophy front and centre.

Navigating a Male-Dominated Industry

Fintech and payments remain heavily male-dominated, particularly in senior technical and decision-making roles, and Chanelle’s early career reflected that. She admits she felt pressure to prove herself from the outset – to be loud enough, visible enough, technical enough to be taken seriously.

Over time, her thinking shifted. “Success doesn’t require being the loudest person in the room,” she says. What matters more is staying curious, understanding the industry deeply, and being willing to keep asking questions – even the ones that might seem basic. That mindset, she says, has served her far better than trying to perform confidence she didn’t yet feel.

Advice for Young South African Women Considering Fintech

Chanelle is direct about the one thing she wants young women to stop believing: that you need to already be technical to belong in payments.

“Those skills can be learned,” she says simply. What can’t be taught as easily is curiosity, adaptability, and a willingness to be uncomfortable and in an industry being reshaped by AI and constant innovation, that willingness is arguably more valuable than any technical head start. Her advice isn’t to wait until you feel ready. It’s to get in, stay proactive, and let the technical fluency catch up.

Where the Boardroom Meets the Sash

Balancing a demanding payments career with being a Mrs South Africa finalist and a mother might look like juggling two unrelated worlds. Chanelle sees it differently — she sees the overlap.

“The payments industry taught me to solve problems and hold my own in meetings,” she explains. “Mrs South Africa gave me the confidence to be visible and tell my story.” Rather than one identity competing with the other, each has sharpened a different muscle. It’s led her to a broader realisation that she’s keen to pass on: women don’t have to pick a lane. Career, motherhood, competing, advocacy — they can, and often must, coexist.

That multidimensionality isn’t theoretical for Chanelle. At 33, a medical emergency while running revealed a heart condition, leading to a pacemaker she’s affectionately named “Electra.” It forced a complete overhaul of her schedule and working hours and gave her what she calls a second chance, one that now fuels how she shows up in her career, her parenting, and her marriage. In a twist she still finds surprising for a former school sprinter, she now runs endurance races to reduce her dependency on the pacemaker, having completed two Cape Town Marathons and more than twenty half marathons.

What Meaningful Representation Actually Requires

Asked what meaningful representation for women in finance looks like beyond Women’s Month campaigns and panel photos, Chanelle doesn’t hesitate: visibility alone isn’t enough.

“Give women the opportunity to lead big projects, make decisions, and grow into technical roles,” she says — not just a seat at the table, but a real hand in shaping what happens next. She pushes back specifically on the default assumption that a woman in the room is probably the least technical person present. Changing that assumption, she argues, is exactly the kind of work that needs to happen if more women are going to help shape the future direction of payments technology in South Africa.

Chanelle Badenhorst is a payments specialist and Mrs South Africa finalist based in South Africa. Peach Payments is sponsoring her on journey to take the crown.

At Peach Payments, we see this journey daily. Merchants start with a vision to scale globally and suddenly, the technical weight of managing those payment gateway feels overwhelming.

I sat down with Akshay Jugjeewon, our Pre-Sales Solution Architect, to talk about how we help merchants solve this exact challenge. Akshay works on the front lines, helping enterprise merchants simplify their setup so they can focus on what they do best: growing their business.

By streamlining their operations into an efficient payment gateway, businesses can focus on growth and innovation.

Here is what he sees as the biggest hurdle—and how you can clear it.The Complexity of “Doing It All”

When an enterprise lead approaches us, their biggest requirement is often “orchestration.” They don’t want to deal with five different integrations for five different countries.

“Merchants want to scale operations across multiple countries at once,” Akshay explains. “If you’re launching in the Ivory Coast and Kenya, you need a unified integration—one that works across your web, iOS, Android, and Flutter platforms seamlessly.”

That’s where our orchestration capability comes in. Instead of struggling with fragmented systems, you use a single set of credentials and one integration to manage payments across multiple countries and gateways. It turns a logistical headache into a competitive advantage.

Akshay’s role as a Pre-Sales Solution Architect isn’t just to sign a contract and hand over a manual. It’s about partnership.

He starts by sitting down with your technical team—the architects and engineering leads—to understand exactly what you’re building. He looks at your current systems and finds ways to improve or match them. If you need a new feature, like managing bill runs or specialised security tokenisation, we collaborate directly with our product and developer teams to bring that to life for you.

And because tech issues don’t always happen between 9 and 5, we’re there to support your developers on Slack/WhatsApp/Email. We don’t just provide a gateway; we provide a technical teammate

Akshay’s 3 Tips for Scaling with Confidence

If you’re preparing to move from legacy systems to a API integration, keep these three things in mind:

1. Infrastructure is everything. As your transaction volumes grow, your infrastructure needs to be ready. Choose a partner that is built for scale, not just for the volume you have today, but for the volume you want tomorrow.
2. Compliance isn’t optional. Staying PCI compliant is critical. Don’t cut corners here; ensure your gateway provides the security and compliance frameworks you need so you can protect your customers and your reputation.
3. Build trust through experience. In some regions, recurring payments or new payment methods like “tap and pay” are still relatively new to customers. Your gateway needs to offer customisation and security features that reassure your customers, every single time they pay. Educate your users—make them feel safe, and you’ll make them repeat customers.

We’re in Your Corner

Growth brings complexity, but it doesn’t have to be intimidating. We’re passionate about our merchants’ success, and we take our responsibility as your payment partner seriously.

We’re here to handle the technical heavy lifting so you can focus on building the next big thing. Let’s talk about how we can help you orchestrate your next phase of growth.

For 20 years, payment security treated bots as the enemy. Agentic commerce just flipped that assumption upside down.

Over the last year, agentic commerce has shifted from a conference concept to reality. Visa enrolled local banks in its Agentic Ready programme, Mastercard unveiled Agent Pay, and OpenAI and Stripe integrated Instant Checkout. By March 2026, Mastercard and Google open-sourced Verifiable Intent. The underlying premise is elegant: an AI agent acts for you, and the payment just happens.

McKinsey projects AI agents could mediate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global agentic retail commerce by 2030. But removing the human loop creates an entirely new attack surface. When a human is no longer in the room, how do we know an autonomous agent is doing what the customer actually asked for?

The great inversion

Almost every cyber defense we’ve built rests on a single assumption: humans are legitimate, and automation through bots is suspect. CAPTCHAs, rate limits, and behavioural biometrics exist to block automated traffic.

Agentic commerce completely inverts this paradigm. Now, your most valuable traffic arrives as a bot. The question “prove you’re human” is obsolete. The new question is: “Prove you’re an authorised agent acting within scope.”

The challenge is running two regimes simultaneously. Malicious bots haven’t disappeared, and card-testing and scraping are still rampant. We must block hostile automation while welcoming legitimate agents, and tell them apart in milliseconds. Added to that, AI agents reason and adapt, and they can be socially engineered. That makes a legitimate agent hijacked via prompt injection a trusted actor carrying out an attacker’s instructions, not a ‘bad bot’.

Three questions to ask now

Who is the agent, really? Cryptographic wrappers like Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)’s Mandates and Mastercard’s Verifiable Intent are major milestones. However, these competing protocols are still settling into interoperable standards under the FIDO Alliance’s newly formed 2026 working groups, which work towards a passwordless society.

What happens when the agent gets hijacked? Prompt injection is a critical risk. If an attacker slips malicious, invisible text into a product description, they can alter the agent’s instructions (e.g., tripling an inventory order and changing the shipping address). The defensive plumbing is documented by the Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP), but field-tested defenses in live payment flows remain thin.

How fast can fraud happen? Human fraud is limited by human speed. Agents operate in milliseconds, executing thousands of attempts before an analyst can refresh a dashboard. Legacy fraud signatures like typing cadence or session velocity are useless here.

What can leaders do now? 

First, get a seat at the table early. Security teams should join product conversations before the architecture is locked in. Retrofitting agent identity into a production checkout is incredibly painful.

Next, treat intent as a first-class security problem. Don’t assume networks fully solve delegation. Build controls that explicitly define what an agent is authorised to do, who proves it, and how that authority is revoked.

Thirdly, recalibrate fraud detection. Retrain models to recognise machine-speed behavior, distinguishing between automated abuse and legitimate autonomous purchases.

Finally, extend AI governance. Apply your existing AI governance frameworks to third-party agents transacting against your systems.

AI security that treats agentic commerce seriously is not a Silicon Valley luxury. In fragmented financial landscapes like African payments, intelligent orchestration delivers immense value, but weak controls will do profound damage. 

The companies that treat agent identity and machine-speed fraud as core design requirements today will hold a definitive advantage. This is where payment security and AI governance converge, and it is the most critical problem our industry faces.

From Moving Money to Orchestrating Scale

The broader payments industry is currently trapped in what I call the “race to zero.” Competitors are slashing transaction fees in a desperate bid to win market share, treating payment processing as a basic utility, much like electricity or water. At Peach Payments, we believe that while payments is utility at the pure processing level – there is an inherent complexity and opportunity to differentiate at the layers above, especially with the integration of a robust payment gateway.

Utilising a payment gateway can streamline this process, allowing businesses to focus on growth and customer satisfaction while reducing operational complexities.

As an enterprise client this can mean accessing new customers, new countries and more importantly improving conversion rates which will more than compensate for any short term gain from a cheaper basic processing solution. This realisation has driven our strategic pivot from being a company that simply “moves money” to one that “orchestrates scale”.

We have introduced an updated Payment Orchestration Layer, which serves as the central nervous system for an enterprise’s financial operations. Rather than a linear path from merchant to bank, orchestration allows for:

1. Rule-Based Routing: The system can automatically decide, in milliseconds, which bank or processor is most likely to approve a specific transaction at the lowest possible cost i.e. balancing the trade-off between conversion and cost.
   
2. Failover Redundancy: In the African context, “uptime” is a relative term. Banks go down, and telecommunications links fail. Our orchestration engine provides instant redundancy. If one provider fails, the traffic is immediately re-routed to a secondary or tertiary provider. The merchant stays live, the customer remains happy, and the revenue is secured.

This leads to our “Open Kitchen” philosophy. Most payment providers treat their internal processes as a black box. You put a transaction in, and hopefully, money comes out the other side. We take the opposite approach. We want our enterprise partners to see the “messy innards” of  tax laws, fraud vectors, and local regulatory requirements. By providing this level of transparency and visibility, we prove our value as an architect. We handle the complexity so that the merchant can focus on their core ambition: growth.

Building Resilient Code: Security, AI, and Network Tokenisation

As we look toward 2026, the definition of “resilience” in fintech is evolving. It is no longer enough to be secure; you must be proactive.

One of our most significant technical levers is Network Tokenisation. At the core of this is a unified token strategy, where Peach Payments provides merchants with a single, PCI-compliant token that represents a customer’s payment credentials. This token can be safely stored and reused across channels (web, mobile, recurring billing), which removes the need for merchants to handle sensitive card data directly and significantly reduces PCI scope.

More importantly, it solves the problem of “involuntary churn”. For subscription-based businesses, like the home cleaning or meal kit services we partner with, an expired credit card usually means a lost customer. With network tokenisation and built-in lifecycle management, the token remains valid even if the physical card is replaced, ensuring the billing cycle remains uninterrupted.

Regarding the opportunities of Artificial Intelligence, my perspective is built-on 2 pillars – consumer behavior and risk management. There is no doubt that consumer behavior is evolving and that AI will fundamentally affect digital commerce. On the risk front, we believe AI governance belongs in the CISO’s (Chief Information Security Officer) office. We don’t use AI just to generate marketing copy. We use it for proactive threat modeling. In a continent where fraud patterns can shift overnight, AI allows us to identify and neutralise sophisticated fraud vectors before they impact our merchants’ bottom lines.

Furthermore, a system is only as strong as its weakest link. That’s why real-time payouts with bank verification is a gamechanger. The goal is to ensure that every pay-out is verified before a single cent moves. By confirming account ownership and details in real-time, we eliminate the administrative nightmare of failed disbursements and the catastrophic risk of man-in-the-middle fraud.

Conclusion: Complexity. Solved.

At the end of the day, our brand promise is captured in two words: Complexity. Solved. To be clear, “Solved” does not mean the complexity of the African market has been eliminated. The capital controls are still there, the currencies are still volatile, and the regulations are still fragmented. What “Solved” means is that this complexity has been engineered, contained, and stress-tested by an architect.

We provide our partners with what we call “earned calm”. It is the peace of mind that comes from knowing your payment infrastructure is as ambitious as your business plan. For the enterprise leader, the message is simple: Stop looking for a tool that promises to make Africa look easy. Start looking for an architect who knows exactly why it is hard—and has built a system to thrive in it anyway.

First published in the Business Day Payments, May 2026.

The Gap Between Narrative and Infrastructure

For more than a decade, the global financial community has been captivated by the “Africa Rising” narrative. It is a story told in broad, optimistic strokes: a continent of 1.4 billion people, the youngest median age on the planet, and a digital-first population that famously leapfrogged the desktop era straight into the mobile age.

From a high-level perspective, the trajectory looks like a straight line toward prosperity.

However, as any enterprise leader operating within the African landscape will tell you, the view from the boardroom is often much more granular and far more complex. There is a profound gap between the optimistic narrative of a unified digital market and the technical, fragmented reality of moving money across borders. In Africa, payments are not just another feature of commerce; they are the primary friction point.

Moving value from Point A to Point B within a country and more so across the continent is fundamentally hard. It is not merely a challenge of writing efficient code or building sleek user interfaces. It is a grueling exercise in navigating varied capital controls, managing the volatility of dozens of different currencies, and coordinating with a patchwork of disparate banking partners, each with their own legacy systems and regulatory hurdles.

At Peach Payments, our thesis is simple: Success for the modern enterprise does not come from a “simple plug-and-play” solution. In a market this fragmented, simplicity is often a mask for fragility. True scale requires a robust architecture, a system designed not only to process transactions, but also to withstand the structural chaos of a continent in flux.

The Fragmentation of Value: Processing $6 Billion in a Regional Mosaic

To understand the scale of the challenge is to understand the sheer volume of value currently being orchestrated behind the scenes. Peach Payments annually processes over  USD $6 Billion. This isn’t just a vanity metric; it represents the lifeblood of thousands of enterprises, from global airlines and insurance giants to domestic retail powerhouses.

Our infrastructure is currently live with over 50 stores of value, such as card acquirers, mobile money wallets, buy now pay later services and more,  across the continent. This is  a technical feat that has allowed us to transition from a South African stalwart to a truly pan-African leader. Our footprint now covers the strategic hubs of South Africa, Kenya, and Mauritius, and has recently expanded into the high-growth markets of West Africa.

The acquisition of the West-African payment platform PayDunya was a pivotal moment in this journey. It wasn’t just about adding dots to a map; it was about gaining entry into the UEMOA Francophone zone,  specifically Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Burkina Faso, Togo, and Mali.

This region represents a massive, underserved economic block that operates under a different regulatory and cultural logic than the Anglophone markets of the south and east.

When you look at this regional mosaic, the fragmentation becomes visible. In South Africa, the payment landscape is relatively mature, with card transactions (credit and debit) still dominating approximately 70% of the online market.

However, as you move north, the picture shifts dramatically. In Kenya and across West Africa, “the card” is often the alternative, not the norm. Here, value is stored and moved through a dizzying array of Alternative Payment Methods (APMs)—digital wallets, vouchers, and mobile money systems like M-Pesa or Orange Money.

Enterprises attempting to scale across these borders cannot simply export their South African payment strategy. They need a partner who understands that in Nairobi, “cash is king” has been replaced by “mobile money is king maker”.

First published in the Business Day Payments, May 2026. Read part 2 here.

The R130 Billion Milestone

South Africa’s online retail landscape is no longer an “emerging” market; it is a mature powerhouse. According to the latest findings of the 2025 Online Retail in South Africa report, the sector is set to surpass R130 Billion this year. This represents nearly 10% of total retail, a structural realignment of the national economy.

Biometrics and the 20% Boost

Despite this growth, many retailers are still leaving money on the table. Our research shows that 39% of consumers now cite digital wallets as their preferred and fastest payment option. However, adoption among retailers has lagged behind consumer demand. At Peach Payments, we’ve seen that merchants who implement Apple Pay experience a 20% higher conversion rate. The reason is simple: biometric security (FaceID/TouchID) removes the moment of hesitation at checkout. By eliminating the need to manually enter card details, we turn browsers into buyers in seconds.

The Rise of Enterprise Omnichannel

The future of retail is not just “online”—it is omnichannel. We have launched enterprise-grade Point-of-Sale (POS) devices that finally bridge the gap between the web store and the physical storefront. For the first time, a retailer can see a single, unified view of their transactions, inventory, and settlements in a single dashboard, irrespective of whether consumers have bought online or offline. Even loyalty rewards are as simple as tapping your card without the need for separate QR codes, apps or hardware.

Case Study: The Digicape Standard

Look at Digicape, South Africa’s leading independent Apple reseller. By partnering with Peach Payments, they consolidated their entire payment ecosystem, which previously involved ten different providers, into a single integration. The result? They were able to scale their operations to handle 5x year-on-year growth during the high-pressure Black Friday period. With Peach Payments, they achieved a “single source of truth” for their financial data, proving that when you solve the complexity of the backend, the frontend takes care of itself.

Look at Digicape, South Africa’s leading independent Apple reseller. By partnering with Peach Payments, they consolidated their entire payment ecosystem, which previously involved ten different providers, into a single integration. The result? They were able to scale their operations to handle 5x year-on-year growth during the high-pressure Black Friday period. With Peach Payments, they achieved a “single source of truth” for their financial data, proving that when you solve the complexity of the backend, the frontend takes care of itself.

Peach Payments fast fact:

Over the 2025 Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, Peach Payments processed more than 2,69 million transactions, to a total value of more than R1,86bn

Download the 2025 Online Retail Report for key findings, insights and important actions to scale your growth.

The travel and hospitality sector is arguably the most complex payment environment on the continent. The opportunity is undeniable: South Africa enjoyed a 19% increase in inbound tourism arrivals in 2025. Concurrently, a new demographic of younger, domestic travelers is emerging, driven by social media inspiration and a desire for experiential travel. Understanding the nuances of hotel payments is crucial for businesses in this sector.

The Complexity of Travel Payments

Capturing this booming market requires more than a simple checkout page; it requires speaking the financial language of the traveler. A recent study by Phocuswright, sponsored by Peach Payments and PayJustNow, points out key trends the modern traveler expects from businesses. 

• Winning the battle at Checkout: For 40% of the South African population, inspiration happens on social media, but the actual purchase is secured on the web. Adding diverse payment options directly improves conversion rates.
• Digital Wallets: Digital wallets are rapidly becoming the preferred choice for South Africans, with nearly 4 in 10 (39%) citing them as the fastest payment option.
• The BNPL Dilemma: The global BNPL market was forecast to reach $560 billion in 2025, reflecting 13.7% year-over-year growth. In South Africa, the BNPL sector is projected to be worth $913.6 million by 2033.
• Cart Abandonment: Cumbersome 3D Secure verification processes and technical failures remain a leading cause of drop-offs in the South African market.

Orchestration as the Ultimate Solution

Adding payment methods is easy but reconciling them is the true enterprise challenge. When a travel brand uses multiple Payment Service Providers (PSPs), managing refunds and matching net settlement values against specific passenger records becomes an administrative nightmare.

As industry leaders have noted, resolving this requires a single orchestration platform. It is a unified system that talks to multiple backend PSPs through one user interface.

This is where Peach Payments acts as the architect. By integrating directly into enterprise hospitality booking and airline systems, we consolidate the chaos. We navigate the high-friction risk models of BNPL, streamline 3D Secure routing, and enable targeted innovations like national payment systems to seamlessly capture the influx of international tourists.

By abstracting the complexity of multi-currency settlements and automated reconciliation, we ensure that travel brands can focus entirely on the guest experience.

Published in the Business Day, Payments, March 2026

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“Hotels are under pressure to deliver seamless guest experiences across the reception desk, in-house restaurant and local spa, but also have to tighten operational control and reduce fraud exposure.”

says Anine de Kock, Head of Partnerships at leading African

Efficient hotel payments can significantly enhance the overall experience for both guests and staff. “Many hospitality payment environments were not designed to operate as a unified system, however, and the hospitality industry is at varying stages on the digital transformation journey. Integrating effective hotel payments is a crucial. step in the process.

Here, De Kock shares five of the biggest payment pain points the hospitality industry faces and what can be done about them.

1. Fragmented systems and operational bottlenecks

Many hotels still rely on payment systems that require front desk staff to manually capture information and switch between multiple platforms during busy check-in and checkout periods.

This results in longer queues, frustrated guests and increased pressure on staff. For hotel groups with multiple properties, the situation is exacerbated by limited payment visibility across locations. The admin pressure on head office finance staff becomes a major operational bottleneck.

“Integrated payment infrastructure with real-time transaction flows, automated reconciliation and centralised reporting across the entire operation solves this problem,”

suggests Anine de Kock

2. Manual reconciliations

Reconciliation remains one of the hospitality industry’s biggest administrative headaches.

“In larger hotel groups, the process can become so resource-intensive that dedicated staff are needed purely to investigate and match payments. This slows financial reporting and limits real-time visibility,”

De Kock continues.

She adds that automated reconciliation that integrates directly into hotels’ payment and property management systems is one way hotel groups are managing this challenge.

“Real-time transaction matching, faster reporting and improved operational efficiency are a game-changer we’re seeing the hospitality industry embrace.”

3. Slow, risky refund process

Refunds remain a major pain point for establishments. Larger amounts often require additional approval and processes may still rely on paper forms that contain sensitive card details. This approach increases delays and risk for both the hotel and the guest. Delayed refunds also directly affect guest confidence and loyalty, she notes.

“A more effective approach, is a secure, tokenised payment environment that makes controlled digital refunds possible. Ideally, it should be supported by role-based permissions, audit trails and automated refund controls.”

says Anine de Kock

4. Compliance and fraud risks

Payment processes that involve printed slips, handwritten card details, and unsecured customer data storage increase a hotel’s compliance risks, fraud exposure and chargebacks.

PCI-compliant payment environments help reduce these risks, De Kock comments. They ensure sensitive card data is never exposed or stored in plain text. These environments deliver digital audit trails and role-based access controls that simplify compliance and dispute resolution.

“Across the globe, payment security has moved from being an IT-only issue to being a brand trust issue. Consumers want reassurance that their payment details are safe and that businesses comply with the latest international standards like the PCI Data Security Standard,”

says Anine de Kock

5. Delayed settlements and tight cashflows

“Cashflow visibility is critical, yet many payment environments still involve settlement delays and slow release cycles that create uncertainty around fund availability. This limits operational agility,” De Kock says.

She emphasises that it is vital to have real-time visibility into payments and settlements across all properties and channels.

“Payment systems should give hotels direct settlements, to improve cashflow, but also to reduce manual oversight and make it easier to predict future cashflows. This is why payment infrastructure has become a strategic operational layer rather than simply a back-office function,”

De Kock says.

“The hospitality industry is moving toward a far more connected operational model. The properties that digitise their payment infrastructure now will be better positioned to improve guest experiences, strengthen financial controls and scale more efficiently in the future,” she concludes.