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

Download The Future of Travel Research findings to unlock more key findings.

“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.

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Most businesses spend significant time and money getting customers to a product page.

Then they lose them at checkout.

According to the 2025 World Wide Worx Online Retail Report, checkout friction is now the leading cause of cart abandonment, cited by 37% of retailers.

For years, businesses focused on driving more traffic. Today, the bigger opportunity is converting the traffic they already have.

The question is simple:

How quickly can a customer go from “I want this” to “I’ve bought it”?

Why checkout friction matters

The traditional online checkout journey hasn’t changed much in years:

Product → Cart → Checkout → Enter Details → Payment

The problem is that every additional step creates another opportunity for customers to leave.

A distraction. A slow page load. A lengthy form. A second thought.

Modern consumers are used to ordering food, booking transport and subscribing to services with a few taps. E-commerce is increasingly being measured against those experiences.

The fastest buying journeys often generate the highest conversion rates.

Mobile changed customer expectations

Checkout friction becomes even more noticeable on mobile.

Typing card details and billing information on a smartphone is time-consuming, especially when customers are browsing on social media, watching TV or multitasking.

The longer the checkout process, the greater the chance they’ll abandon it.

Why wallets are becoming the preferred way to pay

Digital wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay remove unnecessary effort from the checkout experience.

Instead of manually entering payment details, customers can pay using credentials already stored on their device and authenticate with Face ID, a fingerprint or a passcode.

The result is a faster, more trusted payment experience that benefits both shoppers and merchants.

Benefits include:

• Faster checkout experiences
• Better mobile conversion
• Stronger customer trust
• Fewer abandoned purchases

The next evolution: Embedded Express

If wallets reduce friction, Peach Payments’ Embedded Express removes even more of it.

Rather than sending customers through a traditional cart and checkout flow, Embedded Express allows them to purchase directly from the product page using their preferred wallet.

The journey changes from:

Product → Cart → Checkout → Payment

to simply:

Product → Buy Now

It may seem like a small change, but removing clicks can have a significant impact on conversion.

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Why Embedded Express works

Captures intent immediately

The moment a customer decides they want a product is the moment they’re most likely to buy it. Embedded Express shortens the gap between intent and payment.

Reduces cart abandonment

Long forms, account creation and multiple checkout steps are common reasons customers leave before completing a purchase. Embedded Express removes much of that friction.

Improves mobile conversion

Wallet-powered checkout allows customers to authenticate with a face scan or fingerprint and complete purchases in seconds.

Builds trust

Customers often feel more comfortable paying through Apple Pay or Google Pay than entering card details into an unfamiliar website.

Increases the value of every click

Whether traffic comes from Google, Instagram, TikTok or email campaigns, Embedded Express creates the shortest possible path between product discovery and payment.

Where Embedded Express delivers the biggest impact

Flash sales and limited drops

When inventory is limited, speed matters.

Social commerce

Customers arriving from Instagram or TikTok want to buy quickly, not navigate a lengthy checkout process.

Single-item purchases

If customers typically buy one product at a time, a multi-step cart journey often creates unnecessary friction.

Digital products and subscriptions

Online courses, memberships, software and digital content are ideal candidates for one-click purchasing.

The best checkout is the one customers barely notice

As ecommerce continues to grow, merchants will keep investing in traffic acquisition and customer acquisition.

But many of the biggest conversion gains won’t come from attracting more visitors.

They’ll come from making it easier for existing visitors to buy.

Customers don’t usually abandon purchases because they don’t want the product.

They abandon purchases because buying it became harder than it needed to be.

Wallets and Embedded Express are helping merchants solve exactly that problem.

To learn more about Embedded Express, view our Developer notes.

PayJustNow is now available on the Peach Payments Digit Pro and Go POS devices

“The solution announced today offers easy PayJustNow integration into existing Peach Payments POS terminals for merchants,”

says Anine de Kock, Head of Partnerships at leading African payment service provider Peach Payments,

This is especially important when consumers want cashflow-friendly payment options to secure their purchases across industries, particularly retail.

Says Daniel Hawkins, Executive Head of Marketing at PayJustNow, South Africa’s fastest-growing flexible payment provider: “This single integration offers both a BNPL and a credit product. For merchants, this removes the need for static, printed QR codes, giving them frictionless access to PayJustNow’s base of over four million consumers.”

Flexible payments just got easier in-store

Sales amounts are captured directly at the till, not manually by the customer, leaving less room for error for merchants. The solution includes advanced credit scoring and fraud prevention, as well as a single reconciliation across multiple transactions. It also reduces countertop clutter for merchants, who no longer have to display a static QR code to be scanned alongside a separate POS device.

Aimed at medium to large enterprise merchants, the solution has been piloted since early 2026 with five merchants. It is now being rolled out to the existing merchant base of both companies.

In addition to BNPL options, the Digit Pro offers customised checkout flows, with apps that handle anything from stock control to loyalty and rewards. 

To learn more about PayJustNow, visit this page.<\/p>]]>