• Capitec has launched Capitec Pay powered by Peach Payments.
• Capitec Pay facilitates payments directly from your bank account without the need to input any sensitive information.
• Merchants can rest easy knowing payments are also verified and secure in order to reduce the risk of fraud.

The concept of open banking, whereby third-parties are granted access to a customer’s banking, transaction and other financial data through an application programming interface (API) is starting to gain traction.

The practice of open banking help facilitate payments more easily and that’s exactly what Peach Payments is doing for Capitec Pay.

Capitec Pay is a payment solution from Capitec that lets customers checkout and make a payment faster than would be accomplished via Instant EFT.

All clients need to do is key in their phone number when making a payment and then approve it from their app, no card details or bank login required.

“Shopping online is quick and easy, now checking out is too! Our banking clients can leave their wallets at home and use Capitec Pay to make safe, card-free payments by simply approving their payment on our app. There is no need to enter card details or share bank login details at checkout,” explains head of Capitec Pay, Jerome Passmore.

Peach Payments says that making use of Capitec’s API rather than asking customers to key in sensitive details or rely on screen-scrapping technology should help to reduce the risk of fraud.

“Capitec Pay is a sign of our commitment to open banking and real-time payments. We continue to work with banks to support official integrations which not only deliver a superior real-time experience but also far greater security to bank account holders and users,” Peach Payments co-founder and chief executive officer, Rahul Jain said in a statement.

For merchants, Capitec Pay based payments should be complete instantly with none of the limitations present in manual EFTs. What’s more is that because payments are verified, merchants won’t wake up to fraudulent charge backs .

In addition merchants’ administrative work is reduced as a result of automated payment-to-transaction allocations in their Peach Payments dashboard.

While digital banking fraud is a major concern, South African firms have worked hard to lessen the extent of this fraud. The South African Banking Risk Information Centre reported that digital banking fraud decreased by 18 percent in 2021. With more solutions such as Capitec Pay powered by smart fintech solutions, we look forward to seeing those fraudulent incidents reduced even further.