Mobile payment adoption on the increase
Small businesses face a number of challenges on their road to becoming sustainable enterprises. Not the least of these has been the problem of accepting card-based payments for services rendered at customer sites or at venues such as local markets, due to the relatively high cost of point-of-sale (POS) devices needed to process sales.
This however is rapidly becoming a thing of the past as more small businesses are embracing the technology of SnapScan and moving towards mobile payment solutions explains Vuyo Mpako, Head of Innovation and Channel Design at Standard Bank. Specifically developed for the small business sector by Standard Bank, SnapScan has signed up over 12,000 small businesses nationally, in three short months.
“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.
“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,” says Mr Mpako.
SnapScan is geared to equip small businesses with a quick, easy, affordable and secure payment solution that is driven by Quick Read (QR) technology. It provides businesses with cost-effective hardware, in this case, software in the form of a unique QR code that’s printed on paper. So instead of turning customers away due to a lack of a POS system, business owners can now in essence accept cards.
The process is really simple in that customers scan the unique QR code and confirms the transaction with their user-selected PIN. The merchant immediately receives confirmation via SMS.
Customers can link up to three payment cards on their phones and label them as Business or Personal. This allows them to simply pick the card that they want to use when making payment.
With the SMS notification service as proof of payment, the business can be sure that the payment is legitimate.
SnapScan is also bank agnostic, meaning that you don’t have to be Standard Bank Business Banking customer to utilise the service.
SnapScan is targeted at the informal business market, with a variety of merchants ranging from sandwich makers at Cape Town’s trendy Old Biscuit Mill to street vendors of the bustling Vilakazi Street in Soweto.
There are currently more than 12 000 shops accepting SnapScan as a payment method and the number of customers using the app keeps growing.
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