Hard cash is now more than ever becoming a thing of the physical past.  Many consumers are choosing to make use of online payment methods where they don’t need to fork over hard-earned bank notes. And while online shopping has definitely accelerated the trend, point-of-sales systems still largely rely on money or card transactions.

But with Standard Bank’s SnapScan application, many small business have turned to implementing its secure mobile payment solution – with QR technology being the main driver. The payment method has been so successful that 12 000 small businesses already make use of it.

“As a financial institution serving thousands of small businesses, we believed that this was a major impediment to the future development and sustainability of small businesses. There was an urgent need to provide a real-time payment solution that offered a secure way of collecting payments,” said Vuyo Mpako, Standard Bank’s head of innovation and channel design, in a press statement.

Mpako added that SnapScan was designed because of the trend towards mobile payments, and the fact that almost everything about consumers is stored on their phones.

“In addition, with the advent of truly intuitive apps, the move towards mobile payments was inevitable. Consumers are using their phones as tools to enrich their lives; almost everything about them is stored on their phones including their wallets. Businesses now need to access these virtual wallets and one way of doing that is through SnapScan.”

SnapScan was launched three months ago to be a bank-agnostic mobile payment solution for small businesses.