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SnapScan is today announcing its first major update since its QR code payments feature was popularised in 2013.

“The key difference is essentially the ability to provide even more convenience and speed to

improve the payment process,” CEO of SnapScan Kobus Ehlers explained in a phone interview. “They can now complete the payment anywhere within the range of the store’s beacon.”The new functionality is already available at 30 SnapScan merchants in Cape Town and 20 others around the country which have iBeacons. See the list here.“If you have the feature enabled, and you walk into the range of one of these beacons, it’ll simply display a Pay Here button,” he explained. iPhone users will even have a Merchants icon on their lock screen which means that you don’t even have to open the app to pay.

South African payments startup SnapScan is today announcing its first major update since its QR code payments feature was popularised in 2013. The new payment channel, called SnapBeacons, is meant to provide users a frictionless alternative solution to pay for stuff. Instead of just being able to pay by scanning a QR code, SnapScan customers can now simply tap a button in the app to initiate the transaction via Bluetooth. A message on the customer’s phone will alert them when the option is available.

Several major international companies like Virgin Atlantic, Apple, Macy’s and Walmart are already adopting beacon technology and proximity-based products are a growing trend. “We’re the first in South Africa to roll this technology out and we want to see how we can improve the user experience accordingly,” Ehlers boasted.An added feature, not a pivot

Ehlers noted that from the beginning, the Standard Bank-backed company wasn’t tied to just QR codes. It’s always been looking at new technologies to make mobile payment processes better. “To that end, we constantly play with a whole host of different technologies in the payments channel, of which the one that really got us excited was iBeacons.”An added bonus, the CEO notes that SnapBeacons will only be available to those who are keen to try it out. You can disable the feature if you want to.Read more: From stores to the streets: SnapScan’s road to a cashless society

“We’ve decided not to turn it on by default because we’re quite sensitive that people may want to consider whether they want this feature and reassure themselves that it’s not a big change that will happen over night.” It’s worth noting that this isn’t a complete transition. In some occasions SnapBeacons will make sense, while in other, it won’t.Furthermore, because it’s a hardware based product, it will only be compatible with a certain range of phones like the iPhone 4S and up or most smartphones running Android 4.3 and up.

The company has more than 20,000 payment locations, including retail stores, post offices, and the ATMs of 10 commercial banks. With IFC’s support, Fawry is planning to increase its number of payment locations to 35,000 by 2016. The investment is part of IFC’s efforts to catalyze foreign investment in Egypt, support the private sector, and drive job creation. In the 2012 fiscal year, IFC committed $506 million to seven local projects, a figure that includes $125 million mobilized from other investors. IFC has over $1 billion invested in the country.

M-Pesa is Africa's most successful mobile money service and the region’s largest fintech platform. M-Pesa is the preferred way to make payments across the continent both for the banked and unbanked due to its safety and unmatched convenience.

In 2019, our 41.5 million active customers carried out over 12 billion transactions

M-Pesa is Africa's most successful mobile money service and the region’s largest fintech platform. M-Pesa is the preferred way to make payments across the continent both for the banked and unbanked due to its safety and unmatched convenience.

M-Pesa is Africa's most successful mobile money service and the region’s largest fintech platform. M-Pesa is the preferred way to make payments across the continent both for the banked and unbanked due to its safety and unmatched convenience.  It also provides financial services to millions of people who have mobile phones, but do not have bank accounts, or only have limited access to banking services.

Established on 6th March 2007 by Vodafone's Kenyan associate, Safaricom, M-Pesa is Africa's leading mobile money service with more than 430,000 active agents operating across the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique and Tanzania.

strategy development process, especially when the various units and individuals in the network must collectively execute that strategy. The key issue is this: balancing act between collaborating and competing is delicate and crucial” (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004, p. 197).If co-creation is fundamental to the industry, this needs to leverage on a wider customer perspective that requires introducing the idea of developing ecosystems where the customer is truly free to move and choose the best deal in more competitive markets able to let consumers' ability to make informed decisions against any possible market concentrations among market providers.A business ecosystem (Moore, 1996) reflects the new paradigm of competition in a better way. Traditional management models aimed at gaining competitive advantage, such as vertical or horizontal integration, economies of scale and scope, are not effective anymore. The value of today's companies is determined by the size of its ecosystem (Tewari, 2014). Business ecosystems consist in crossovers of a variety of industries, of which companies cooperate and embrace open innovation to satisfy new customers' needs an

evaluation, others were quite lucky and suffered less.There are many and different feelings on the way FinTechs will exit this situation, which as far as we understand has overall accelerated some strategic choices.First of all, there are many and different FinTechs in the market. What is critical is to look at the fundamentals of the business. All of them are about answering what society is going to look like in the future (attitudes, behaviors, habits, etc.), so that if we no longer need to go to retail stores anymore, why do we need some services based on this situation? This, again, underlines that banking is a people business (Omarini, 2015) and this requires a business to be resilient to become adaptive to consumer changes or moves into a different market where you can still apply the service because the society is not yet ready to shift somewhere else, which means the same business in different markets. Just think of the ongoing situation where the recent wave of people is rethinking and restructuring their finances, so that they have decided to switch rates to digital banks. In this scenario, the winners are those that have enough liquidity—or better still cash-rich—to buy good technology and invest in new directions, also taking the opportunity to use the pandemic to its advantage. This is especially true for payments that are going to be increasingly contactless. However, some more les

sons can be learnt from difficult times especially due to external factors such as the following:- People costs and per-customer contribution margin are key factors, and valuable indicators. They are valuable for incumbents too. When staff costs rise, then this becomes a burden if growth is not going to move on. Then, if we move on the per-customer contribution margin (revenue, minus variable costs including credit losses), then this makes a FinTech earn more money per bank account than the cost of running those bank accounts.- One more point has to do with the way a FinTech makes its revenues per customer, and net income is the figure to look out for here. This means that the more sources of revenues a company holds, the better it is for it. If we think of some of the best-known FinTechs, they gather their net income from interchange fees, ATM withdrawals, which can diminish during the pandemic, but gathering revenues from other sources such as lending, investing, or again from referring customers to third-party services, and earning commissions from these referrals.Under this oncoming market structure configuration, a focus on control and ownership of resources is giving way to the importance of accessing and leveraging resources through unique ways of collaboration. “The co-creation process also challenges the assumption that only the firm's aspirations matter. (…) Every participant in the experience network collaborates in value creation and competes in value extraction. This result in constant tension in the

One more point has to do with the way a FinTech makes its revenues per customer, and net income is the figure to look out for here. This means that the more sources of revenues a company holds, the better it is for it. If we think of some of the best-known FinTechs, they gather their net income from interchange fees, ATM withdrawals, which can diminish during the pandemic, but gathering revenues from other sources such as lending, investing, or again from referring customers to third-party services, and earning commissions from these referrals.

The emergence of new technologies and players, along with a favorable regulatory framework (PSD2 Directive), is changing the banking industry. FinTechs and TechFins have allowed the introduction of new services and changed the way customers interact to satisfy their financial needs. The FinTech landscape is constantly evolving in the market. Different business value propositions are entering the financial services industry, moving from increasing the user's experience to developing a time to market framework for banks to innovate products, processes, and channels, increasing the cost efficiency and looking for a “partnering on order” to lighten the regulatory burdens for banks. The many businesses of banks are changing their value chains, and banks' business models should do the same accordingly. Strategists could no longer take their value chains as a given; choices have to be made on what needs to be protected and maintained, what abandoned and the new on coming to make banks evolve and become more resilient in doing their job. Banking is shifting significantly from a pipeline, vertical paradigm, to open banking business models where open innovation, modularity, and ecosystem-based bank's business model may become the ongoing mainstream and paradigm to follow and develop. Opportunities and threats for banks are many and new ones to re-gaining their role in the market throughout a re-intermediation process.

They have brought to the traditional banking industry a wave of competition and broken pipeline value chains, unbundling them into different modules of products or services, which may be combined among themselves. These companies on the one hand and the BigTechs (Google, Facebook, Apple, Samsung, Alibaba, etc.) on the other have been forcing the industry to change, transform, and evolve in a set of new financial intermediation directions. Use of data and customer experience are both FinTechs' major assets and threats as well. On the one hand, they please the customers as individuals and introduce the paradigm of contextual banking. On the other, the two selling points are threatening both the incumbent players and regulators in different ways. For banks, it is even more urgent to react actively because their “no fee zone” is expanding, due to new regulations from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureaus (CFPB) and similar entities in different countries.

Evolving checkout processes are one of the fastest growing trends in the retail space, as users are demanding better and more flexible shopping experiences and payment processes. Because of this, cashless payments and omnichannel options are becoming the norm, putting forward the business case for mobile payments, as they provide customers with a consistent experience. In fact, retailers that are reconfiguring their systems to accommodate increasing mobile customers – who expect multichannel options which support quick and secure digital payments – are more likely to see a boost in sales and growth.

SnapScan offers quick, easy, and secure mobile payment solutions to retailers so their customers can enjoy the convenience of paying on the fly.

Evolving checkout processes are one of the fastest growing trends in the retail space, as users are demanding better and more flexible shopping experiences and payment processes.

Today every industry, but especially the retail industry, is experiencing pressure to implement digital solutions in order to remain competitive.

Evolving checkout processes are one of the fastest growing trends in the retail space, as users are demanding better and more flexible shopping experiences and payment processes.

SnapScan is the preferred way for South Africans to pay with their phones.

Key Features Fast and easy signup Simple integration Customers need not re-enter card details Customers scan on a desktop or click to pay on a mobile device Responsive and mobile friendly Payment happens onsite with a trusted mobile payment provider!

Digital banking for all lifestyles

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Our physical debit cards give you access to cash withdrawals anywhere. And with our secure virtual cards, you can pay for products on your favourite online stores, in dollars.

The best online loan service hands down. Just ensure to pay your loans on time and you'll get access to better loans and so many other rewards. Very ideal for fast track business owners who need quick access to funds on the go.

SnapScan offers a simple solution that can be used anywhere and at any time, suiting merchants who trade in small locations, indoors or outdoors. SnapScan is also a great solution in times of load-shedding, when electrical payment systems are unavailable.

SnapScan is currently one of the most popular mobile payment apps in South Africa with no sign of slowing down. It facilitates a variety of payments: in-store, online, bills, donations, or prepaid services from within the app.