QR Interoperability in South Africa

There are many systems working behind the scenes to power payment networks and everyday payment use cases. Scan to Pay is one of those systems, enabling more than 600,000 merchants across South Africa to accept QR payments. If you have ever scanned a QR code from your banking app to make a payment, you have used Scan to Pay in the background. Our mission has always been simple - to make payments easier for every merchant and every consumer.

Over the years, interoperability and standardisation have become increasingly important in the payments industry. Not only do they improve the user experience, but they also help ensure compliance and security standards are consistently maintained across banks, fintechs, merchants, and payment providers. Protecting both our customers and their users has always been at the centre of how we design and operate our systems.

From the early days, we committed ourselves to interoperability. Scan to Pay was the first QR payment network in South Africa to establish bilateral agreements with other QR ecosystems, enabling consumers to scan across networks rather than being locked into a single platform. Around the same time, we led the creation and implementation of the EMVCO QR standard, which Scan to Pay still supports. 

Our belief has always been that open ecosystems create better outcomes for everyone involved. We feel so strongly about this that over the years, we have given fintechs and store of value providers access to our merchant base, with the goal of simplifying digital payments and increasing acceptance across the market.

At the heart of it all is a simple principle: QR payments should just work. Consumers should be able to pay using the app of their choice, merchants should not need to worry about which network a customer belongs to, and payment providers should be able to innovate on top of shared standards.

This brings us to the next chapter in the story of QR interoperability in South Africa.

An industry initiative led by the South African Reserve Bank and PayInc has brought together banks, fintechs, and payment providers to define how the future of interoperable QR payments should evolve. Scan to Pay has been closely involved with this working group from the outset, ensuring this new interoperable ecosystem builds on the open QR principles we have championed in South Africa for years. The result is QR+.

Much like our previous integrations with other QR networks, we have already implemented support for QR+ within the Scan to Pay platform.

In practical terms, this means that our 600,000 merchants already connected to Scan to Pay will be able to accept QR+ payments without requiring changes to their existing integrations. As QR+ is rolled out by the SARB and participating fintechs and payment providers, merchants connected to our network will automatically become QR+ enabled.

We will continue to support the SARB initiatives and lead the way with QR payments in South Africa. Our mission remains strong - making payments simpler, safer, and more seamless for merchants and consumers alike.

This is going to be an exciting chapter for both our customers and Scan to Pay.