PayU, Mastercard seek to speed up online shopping in South Africa

June 22, 2023 Siyabonga Mtangana

Mastercard and Naspers-owned PayU have joined forces to launch Click to Pay as a way to speed up online payments in South Africa.

Click to Pay allows consumers to make payments without entering their credit card details or storing sensitive information across various platforms – instead, they provide their details only once, after which the process is almost instantaneous.

With “intelligent recognition”, consumers can quickly access their preferred cards and saved details. The system allows payment service providers and merchants to set up a single integration, while security features such as bot detection, tokenisation, device spoofing prevention and data encryption mean fraud should be reduced.

Mastercard country manager Gabriel Swanepoel said at a launch of the partnership in Johannesburg this week that in 2017 digital commerce in South Africa amounted to US$2-billion, whereas today the figure stands at about $5-billion.

After Covid-19, when digital commerce increased massively, 50% of consumers in South Africa continued to conduct transactions remotely.

Swanepoel said there is a proliferation of new digital transactions developing beyond the usual traditional forms, not only in marketplaces but also in social commerce, as consumers exercise their choices.

“The profile is the same but if the user experience is wrong customers will move away. We will only achieve scale if we build trust, which is why Mastercard is committed to e-commerce and technology,” he said. – © 2023 NewsCentral Media