QR payments find favour with business and consumers, drives new innovation

Although already on a steep adoption curve, Covid has fast tracked many organisations’ digital payments strategies. QR codes in particular are finding favour amongst major South African banks. Capitec’s most recent peer2peer (P2P) account-based payment offering is the latest that Entersekt has helped roll out. And the company says the payment method is likely to continue gaining traction both locally and abroad.

Juniper Research expects almost a third of the world’s population, or 2.2 billion people, to adopt QR payments by 2025. The research company goes on to say that while the payment method is showing particularly strong growth in emerging markets, QR payments are also showing potential in other markets, including the US.

“QR payments are ideal for the South African market. Local customers have shown they are eager to try new and more convenient payment methods, particularly if they are mobile-based and even more so if they are within their existing banking app. These truly contactless payments also make excellent business sense for banks and we have seen strong interest from financial service providers in South Africa and abroad,” says Jonathan van der Merwe, product manager at Entersekt.

Entersekt helped roll out Nedbank’s first-in-market Scan to Pay function in 2018. The payment offering allows Nedbank Money App users to pay any physical or online retailers who offer MasterPass, Snapscan, Pay@ or Zapper QR codes.

Partnering with Entersekt, Absa launched its in-app QR payment option in April 2021. The QR offering was on the back of a host of other digital payment additions including Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Garmin Pay and Fitbit Pay as well as their virtual card. The bank also added its digital fraud warranty to the product, signifying its comfort in the security of the payment option.

Most recently, Entersekt and partners helped Capitec enable their new PayMe QR offering which is a peer2peer account-based offering.

“Our digital payments solution supports the market across a wide range of use cases, including QR and clickable payment links across both card and account rails. We are seeing a lot of interest in this offering as it means customers can pay with their card or through their bank account, which is new in the market.”

The user experience is central to the success of the QR payments solution, van der Merwe explains, because it “creates confidence in the payment experience. Customers will have the exact same user journey each time they want to pay someone or a merchant using the QR payment option.” This unified experience is key in driving down friction in the payment process, he explains.

“A consistent user experience also helps drive adoption. Because customers experience a journey under the same brand within their app, they have an innate trust in the process. The process is so quick and simple – customers don’t have to remember information, they don’t need to input account numbers or names, they don’t have to create a beneficiary. Without logging into the app, customers can create a code that others can scan, and payments can be made. The user experience is so simple that customers will quickly get hooked on this payment method,” he says.

Van der Merwe says the versatility of QR payments is also helping drive the adoption of the payment method globally.

“Keeping the QR functionality in-app is another reason to get customers to download and use banking apps, which in turn helps banks speed up their digitalisation efforts. It’s no surprise that interest in QR payments is quickly growing amongst global banks and organisations looking to use QR to initiate other digital experiences. By using our QR solution, banks can enable quick payment actions as customers would have been validated using two-factor authentication at login. Our QR roadmap is rapidly expanding as we see the demand for the technology increase,” van der Merwe concludes.