How does a PayShap payment work?
PayShap is a push payment. The payer sends money from their banking app or online banking to the recipient’s account number or ShapID, and the money clears between the two banks in real time. A ShapID is an alias for a bank account. At Nedbank, for example, it is usually the customer’s primary cellphone number.
For online sales, merchants use PayShap Request. The merchant, or a provider acting for it, sends a request to pay to the shopper’s cellphone number or account number. The request appears in the shopper’s banking app, and once the shopper approves it, the payment is made immediately. Until then the request stays pending. It can be accepted, declined or left to expire, and at Nedbank the default expiry is 14 days, which the sender can set up to 45 days ahead. Declined or cancelled requests are closed and cannot be reopened.
Limits are set within a scheme maximum. PayShap launched with a cap of R3,000 a payment, raised to R50,000 in October 2024. Banks apply their own limits below that: Nedbank sets a default of R5,000, which customers can raise to R10,000 with in-app approval, or to R50,000 with biometric checks. Some banks may set lower limits for PayShap Request.
Why does PayShap matter for merchants?
It is the national instant rail. PayShap came out of the South African Reserve Bank’s Rapid Payments Programme and was driven by BankservAfrica, renamed PayInc in August 2025, and the Payments Association of South Africa. It is ISO 20022 compliant. The first four banks at launch were Absa, First National Bank, Standard Bank and Nedbank, and by March 2026 it ran across 14 banks, 24 hours a day.
Use has grown fast. PayShap handled 36,631 payments in its first month and 44.8 million in August 2025, when more than 5 million ShapIDs were registered. By March 2026 it had processed 777 million payments worth R709 billion. Before PayShap, an ordinary EFT between banks could take more than a day to clear.
It suits merchants as well as people. More than 250,000 PayShap Requests were processed between October 2024 and March 2026, and payment providers such as Ozow now offer PayShap Request on their payment pages. PayInc has said it plans QR-based payments, access for fintechs and links with card-acceptance infrastructure.
What can go wrong?
The shopper may never approve. A PayShap Request can sit unanswered until it expires, so a checkout needs a pending state and a clear cut-off before the order is cancelled. A declined request cannot be reopened, so the merchant must send a new one.
Limits cause failures. A payment above the payer’s own bank limit fails, even when it is below the R50,000 scheme maximum, and some banks set lower limits for requests.
Refunds are new payments. A PayShap payment cannot be reversed in the scheme, so a refund is a separate PayShap payment or bank transfer from the merchant back to the shopper. There is no card-scheme chargeback, and because the money moves in seconds, a payout or refund that times out should be checked before it is sent again, or the customer may be paid twice.
How would Omno handle PayShap?
A merchant would offer PayShap Request in the hosted checkout or through Direct Links on its own checkout, with the shopper entering a cellphone number or account number. Routing rules set by the merchant would send the request to a provider that supports PayShap. In the hosted checkout, if a provider is unavailable or rejects the request, the payment moves to the next provider in the rule until one accepts. Pending requests would be tracked until the provider reports a final status, and the result would reach the merchant by webhook, which is the source of truth for confirming an order. Payouts could follow PSP eligibility rules and customer verification levels, each with a unique reference, and the routing-decision log would record which provider handled each step.