South Africans are online, but millions still do not shop online. While 79.1% of adults regularly browse the web, only 34.2% of them buy goods online, according to the new Online Retail in South Africa 2026 study. 

“Bridging the gap between browsing and buying depends on merchants building consumer confidence throughout the shopping journey, from discovery and checkout to the final delivery. Getting that right is the single biggest opportunity left in South African retail,” says Arthur Goldstuck, MD of World Wide Worx, which produced the study in partnership with Mastercard, Peach Payments and Ask Africa.  

Creator-led validation

“Winning over the missing 65.8% of online South Africans starts at discovery,” says Reece Meyer, co-founder of digital agency and content creator network Ace Labs. 

When people encounter a product they don’t know yet, they look for real proof from people they trust before spending their money. The 2026 findings reveal that customer reviews and promotions account for 55.3% of the strongest purchase influences, while traditional brand ads sway just 5.4% of shoppers.

“Shoppers are moving away from traditional ad paths. Discovery has become much more trust-led. Consumers look for validation from reviews, recommendations and people they identify with before they commit to an unfamiliar product or brand,” Meyer comments.

Familiar checkout experience

Once someone decides to buy, an unfamiliar checkout experience can make them think twice and abandon their cart, at one of the most crucial stages of the sales funnel.

 “Merchants can remove that last-minute hesitation if they offer a range of payment options. When consumers have recognised payment choices, including digital wallets like ApplePay, and a checkout experience they understand, it removes one more reason to abandon the purchase,” says Rahul Jain, CEO and co-founder at Peach Payments.

Consumers recognise these payment options straight away, which gives them the peace of mind to finish the purchase, Jain explains.

Delivery

Logistics is the last stage of the funnel, and makes or breaks the customer experience. High delivery fees and steep minimum-order limits make smaller purchases impractical, especially for shoppers who live outside major urban hubs. 

“Unlocking ecommerce growth outside major metros means making delivery more affordable, reliable and predictable,” says Sahil Affriya, founder and CEO of multi-courier logistics platform Shiprazor.

The study shows that 92.4% of local retailers would switch courier partners to secure lower delivery rates. Consumers, meanwhile, care most about delivery reliability (87.9%), speed (85.4%), helpful customer support (83.8%), and clear shipment tracking (80.3%).

“For many consumers, delivery is where trust is ultimately won or lost. High shipping costs can make smaller orders unviable, but price isn’t the only factor. Merchants need to give customers reliable delivery, clear tracking,and confidence that their order will arrive as promised. When they get that right, delivery becomes a reason to buy again, rather than a barrier to the first purchase,” Affriya comments.

“Merchants who build trust in both the digital and physical worlds can help turn connectivity into participation,” says Goldstuck, “and give more consumers the confidence to transact.”.<\/p>]]> https://www.peachpayments.com/scale/why-good-marketing-ideas-get-stuck/ Thu, 29 Oct 2026 12:52:23 +0000 https://www.peachpayments.com/?p=22703 Disconnects between marketing and development teams can leave customer experience problems unresolved, even when both sides are trying to address the same problem.

“The two teams don’t always speak the same language,” says Peach Payments Marketing Director Yudhvir Ranchod, “Marketers need to translate the request into something a technical team can understand, investigate and act on.”

“Marketing and engineering are both trying to create clarity, but they measure it in very different ways,” he says. “Marketers tell stories that resonate emotionally. Engineers need specificity, a claim they can test, a problem they can scope, and a result they can measure. Neither approach is wrong, but problems arise when we each assume we’re being understood by the other.”

Take a seemingly straightforward request: “Can we make the checkout flow better?”

To a marketer, that means customers are complaining, conversion may be suffering, and the checkout experience needs attention. To an engineer, ‘flow better’ means almost nothing. There is no definition of what’s broken, no measure of success, no sense of whether it means changing a few fields or rebuilding the checkout.

This concern is not trivial. According to the Online Retail in South Africa report, by World Wide Worx, Mastercard, Ask Africa and Peach Payments, 37.3% of retailers cited a long or complicated checkout process as a leading cause of cart abandonment. This is up from 16.9% the previous year.

“So it goes onto the backlog,” says Ranchod, “because the request can’t compete with work that has a defined scope, an owner and a measurable outcome.”

Why adjectives lose

There’s another problem. The average marketing request to engineers doesn’t show what happens if nothing is done. Without a visible cost of inaction, it is competing for limited technical resources against work backed by measurable impact.

“Every other item in the queue has a number next to it. This one has an adjective. Adjectives lose,” says Ranchod.

Marketing teams balance engagement, conversion, customer satisfaction, retention and revenue.  Engineering teams have their own priorities: uptime, security, compliance, incident risk and maintainability. They also consider a question marketers rarely ask: can this be switched off quickly if it goes wrong? The harder a change is to reverse, the greater the risk engineering has to weigh.

“A request isn’t necessarily being rejected because someone doesn’t see its value,” says Ranchod. “Sometimes we simply haven’t given the technical team enough information to weigh that value against everything else they are responsible for.”

The gap between outcome and control

South Africa’s online retail sector reached around R130 billion in 2025, making the commercial cost of checkout friction increasingly difficult to ignore.

The disconnect is especially visible in payments, where much of the customer experience depends on systems outside marketing’s direct control. The checkout experience can depend on everything from payment method coverage and authorisation success rates to authentication, redirects and how failed payments are handled. This often involves product, engineering, payment providers and banks.

The solution can be as simple as asking what happens when a payment fails. Can the customer retry without starting again, or are they left at a dead end? Can it be fixed with a few lines of code?

“As the marketer, you own the commercial outcome, but you don’t own the code,” adds Ranchod. “Closing that gap doesn’t mean marketers need to become engineers. They need enough shared language to ask better questions and turn a customer or commercial problem into something a technical team can investigate. You need to learn to ‘talk foreign’ and make engineers love it.”

Turn the complaint into a hypothesis

Better collaboration starts with what you bring into the room: evidence, a hypothesis, its commercial value, the constraints and, finally, a specific ask.

This moves the conversation to “I think our account creation step causes customers to leave before they pay. Can I get two hours of someone’s time to map the checkout journey and see whether that’s true?”

He recommends two questions, asked early: “What would make this hard?” and “What would you have to stop doing?” Together, they expose constraints and acknowledge that every new priority comes with a trade-off.

“Those questions make you part of the decision rather than another person adding something to the queue,” says Ranchod. “People build for partners first.”

For Ranchod, closing the communication gap is ultimately about making good ideas easier to act on. “As marketers, we want to solve complexity for our customers. That same type of thinking should be applied to internal teams. Bring a number, a hypothesis, and a small ask. Fix the brief and you may be surprised how quickly the new checkout follows.”

“Your technical team is not the obstacle to frictionless payments. The brief is,” concludes Ranchod.

Earlier this year, an online retailer we work with saw its declined payments climb sharply over a single week. Their development team spent several days reviewing the checkout and integration, convinced something had broken. When we looked at the data together, the cause was much narrower: the spike was concentrated among customers of one issuing bank, which was experiencing temporary disruptions. Nothing in the merchant’s own stack needed fixing. The answer had been in their payment data all along. It simply wasn’t visible.

Online merchants are not short of payment data. Transaction exports, settlement reports and finance spreadsheets are all within reach. However, when something changes, such as a dip in approvals, a jump in declines or an unexpected swing in revenue, that data rarely explains why on its own.

This gap between having data and understanding it is an important consideration for any business that relies on online payments to grow.

Payment analytics: key takeaways

• A spike in declined payments does not always mean the checkout is broken. It can often be traced to a single issuing bank with a temporary problem.
• A hard decline usually points to a permanent issue, such as invalid card details, so retrying is unlikely to help. A soft decline is usually temporary, so the payment could still succeed on a later attempt.
• Headline numbers can mislead on their own. Good payment analytics reads transactions, revenue and basket value together to show what actually changed.

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Why payment data is difficult to interpret

A single payment metric can have many causes. A drop in successful payments could be the result of a processor issue, a particular issuing bank, customer behaviour, fraud controls or another part of the payment flow.

Raw totals rarely show which of these is responsible. As a result, teams often fill the gap with manual exports, pivot tables and assumptions, which takes time and frequently leads different people to different conclusions. 

When every team works from a different set of numbers

In many businesses, finance, ecommerce and operations each report on payment performance in their own way. Each team pulls data differently, applies different filters and defines metrics like payment volume or approval rate slightly differently.

The outcome is familiar: conversations that should focus on decisions turn into debates about whose figures are correct. It’s important to note that this is rarely a skills problem. It is a consistency problem, and it can only be solved by giving every team the same definitions and the same source of truth.

Why a decline rate on its own isn’t enough

A decline rate tells a business that payments are failing, but not why, or what can be done about it.

The distinction that matters most is between hard and soft declines. A hard decline usually points to a permanent issue, such as invalid card details or a blocked card, and retrying the payment is unlikely to help. A soft decline is usually temporary, caused by insufficient funds, an issuing or acquiring bank outage, or another technical issue, which means the payment could still succeed on a later attempt.

Without this split, every failed payment looks the same. With it, merchants can see which declines represent lost sales and which represent revenue that may still be recovered.

Not every spike in declines is a system failure

When declines rise suddenly, the natural response is to assume something is broken. Developers are pulled in, the checkout is reviewed, and time is spent investigating a problem that may sit outside the business entirely.

In practice, a spike in declines does not always mean the whole tech stack has a problem. It can often be traced to a single issuing bank experiencing difficulties. Being able to view declines by bank, and across short and longer time periods, allows teams to separate a temporary disruption from a genuine trend, and to focus their effort accordingly.

Why revenue trends need context

An increase or decrease in revenue is only useful once a business understands what caused it. A campaign, a seasonal peak, larger baskets or a shift in how customers pay can all produce similar headline numbers, but each calls for a different response.

Reading metrics together often reveals what a single number hides. For example, a month in which total transactions fall while gross merchandise value (GMV) rises indicates that customers placed fewer orders but spent more on each one. Seen in isolation, either figure could have been cause for concern.

Basket value offers a similar lesson. In one merchant example, the median basket stayed fairly consistent at around R243 to R256 week on week, while the average sat much higher at roughly R450 to R490. This suggests that a small number of high-value purchases were pulling the average up, and that the typical customer transaction is closer to the median.

Payment choice also shapes spend. In the same example, customers using buy now, pay later (BNPL) options spent more per transaction, suggesting that flexible payment methods may help shoppers feel more comfortable with higher-value purchases. For a business deciding which payment methods to prioritise at checkout, that is a meaningful signal.

Moving from payment reporting to payment understanding

For a long time, payment reporting has answered one question: what happened? That was sufficient when payments were treated as a back-office function. Today, checkout is one of the most important levers an online business has, and every failed payment represents a customer who intended to buy.

None of this requires a business to hire a team of data analysts. It does mean treating payment data as a source of decisions rather than a record of history, with consistent definitions, visibility into the causes behind the numbers, and enough context over time to separate normal patterns from meaningful change.

How Peach Payments Analytics helps merchants turn payment data into answers

Peach Payments Analytics is a payment performance dashboard built into the Peach Payments Dashboard, available free of charge to all Peach Payments merchants, in every region we operate. It brings payment performance, decline and revenue insights into one view, using the same definitions and calculations for everyone in the business.

The dashboard is organised into four areas. The Summary view gives a quick health check of processing volume, GMV, authorisation rates, top decline reasons and payment method mix. Decline Insights shows decline trends over 7 days, 60 days and 12 months, separates hard and soft declines, and breaks failures down by issuing bank, bank identification number (BIN) and payment method. Sales Performance compares GMV across the last three years and tracks basket values and the strongest trading days. Payment Method Performance shows which payment methods have the best authorisation rates, and which need attention.

For merchants, the result is less time spent reconciling numbers and more time spent acting on them: understanding where performance is changing, what may be driving it, and where there is an opportunity to improve conversion or recover revenue. To get started, log in to the Peach Dashboard and select Analytics under Reporting, or contact sales@peachpayments.com for a walkthrough.

Visit the Peach Payments Analytics page for more info.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.