Integration Guides
  1. Introduction

What is Scan to Pay?

South Africa's largest QR payment platform — built for banks, fintechs, PSPs, and merchants who need a single, secure, multi-channel payments backbone.

Scan to Pay is South Africa's largest QR payment platform. It powers QR-based payments across every major South African bank, runs through every major acquirer, and is interoperable with the country's leading third-party wallets. It is the payments backbone that banks, fintechs, PSPs, and merchants integrate into for a single, secure, multi-channel acceptance and disbursement layer.

If you've used a QR-based payment in South Africa — scanning at a till, paying a bill, topping up airtime over USSD, sending money inside a banking app — there's a strong chance the transaction ran through Scan to Pay.

What you can do with Scan to Pay

The platform has two sides, and most ecosystem participants integrate with one or both.

Get paid

For merchants, PSPs, and aggregators who want to accept QR-based payments without building card-acceptance infrastructure from scratch.

  • Accept payments online with a hosted or fully custom checkout
  • Accept in-store via printed static QRs, dynamic POS QRs, or app-to-app deep links
  • Accept bill payments from any QR displayed on a statement, invoice, or poster
  • Accept USSD payments from feature-phone customers — extends reach beyond smartphone-only solutions
  • Process refunds and reversals through a single API
  • Receive real-time webhooks with encrypted, signed payloads
  • Settle through your existing acquiring bank with no separate clearing relationship needed

→ Merchant / PSP Integrations

Make payments

For banks, wallet providers, fintechs, and super-apps that host a consumer wallet and want their users to scan and pay from inside it.

  • Embed scan-and-pay capability inside your own banking or wallet app via the Remote API
  • Provision customer cards into a wallet using the Card Provisioning API
  • Support multiple funding sources per customer — credit, debit, cheque, stored value, loyalty points, savings, crypto
  • Send P2P payment requests between users (Pay-for-Me)
  • Enforce 3D Secure flows for e-commerce wallet payments
  • Manage the consumer Wallet App as a stand-alone, co-branded experience — or converge it into your existing banking app

→ Wallet Provider Integrations

Plus In-App Payments for merchant mobile apps

Mobile developers can embed Scan to Pay directly inside an Android or iOS merchant app using the Library Lite SDK — no need to send customers out to another app.

→ In-App Payments

How it works

The same four-step flow underpins every acceptance integration:

  1. Your backend creates a payment code via the Scan to Pay API. The code is a 10-digit string representing an intent to pay.
  2. The code is presented to the customer as a QR on a screen or printout, as a deep link from your mobile app, or via USSD short code.
  3. The customer authorises the payment in their bank or wallet app — PIN-authenticated (AMT) or 3D Secure.
  4. Scan to Pay notifies your backend via webhook (or you poll). Funds route through the acquiring network to your bank account on the acquirer's normal settlement schedule.

For wallet integrations the flow inverts — your wallet receives and processes codes rather than creating them — but the underlying state machine is the same. See Transaction states.

Why partners choose Scan to Pay

National bank coverage. The Scan to Pay wallet ecosystem includes every major South African bank — ABSA, Standard Bank, Nedbank, FNB, Capitec — plus partner wallets like VodaPay. Issuers integrate once and reach the whole acceptance network.

Every major SA acquirer. Transactions route to whichever acquiring bank you already have a relationship with. No need to migrate your settlement or open new bank accounts — Scan to Pay sits on top of the existing card-payment rails.

Authenticated transactions, with liability shift. Every payment is authenticated either by PIN (AMT — Authenticated Mobile Transaction) or 3D Secure. In specific markets this shifts chargeback liability to the issuing bank.

Interoperable with other QR wallets. The Scan to Pay consumer wallet can scan and pay third-party QR codes from SnapScan, Zapper, and the broader ecosystem — extending acceptance for merchants without per-wallet integration.

Multi-channel by design. One platform, one integration, every channel: e-commerce, in-store, mobile-in-app, USSD, app-to-app, bill payment. You don't pick a channel up-front and integrate again for the next one.

PCI DSS compliant. The platform itself runs in PCI DSS scope so that most integrators don't have to. Your scope reduces to whatever card data flows through your own systems.

Built on a decade of payments infrastructure. Scan to Pay evolved from a long-running South African QR payments service. The platform has been processing real-money transactions through the country's banking rails for years.

What to do next

Updated 1 day ago