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The online payments industry changed significantly on 1 April 2026. Visa introduced a major change that will have a real impact on merchants, payment facilitators, and ecommerce businesses across South Africa.Visa's Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP) threshold for "Excessive" merchant fraud and dispute activity has been reduced from 2.2% to just 1.5%. While this may seem like a minor adjustment, it represents a substantial tightening of compliance standards for businesses that accept Visa card payments online. If that includes your online store or digital service, you need to read this article. 

In 1994, an engineer at a Japanese company called Denso Wave invented the QR code to track car parts moving through Toyota's factories. Nobody at the time imagined that three decades later, this little black-and-white square would be moving trillions of rands, rupees, reais and yuan around the world every year. Or that in China, cash would become so rare that even street beggars display QR codes.

Ecommerce customers expect their online shopping experience to be quick, simple, and convenient. The fewer steps they need to complete a purchase, the better. 

Three years after launch, PayShap hasn't taken over the way the headlines promised it would. Let me be honest about that, because pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone. Adoption has been slow. Most South Africans still reach for a card or an EFT out of habit, and plenty of people have used PayShap exactly once, to send money to a friend, and never touched it again.

As part of our ongoing commitment to regulatory compliance and financial transparency, Bob Pay would like to remind merchants of the applicable Ultimate Beneficial Ownership (UBO) disclosure requirements. In this blog, we’ll outline how UBO affects businesses in South Africa.

Bob, a prominent South African e-commerce and financial technology (fintech) entity, has rolled out a Real-Time Payments (RTP) functionality for its Bob Pay offering. This cutting-edge capability, achieved through a direct hook-up with PayShap, permits merchants to process requests for and promptly take in payments from shoppers. It thus establishes a secure, budget-friendly new avenue for completing digital transactions. From a cost perspective, the transaction fee levied on merchants for utilising PayShap is a competitive percentage with a strict maximum cap. This structure means it's substantially more economical for merchants dealing with high-value sales compared to traditional percentage-based card fees.