Few stretches of the calendar test a South African biller like the run from late November to the close of January. Accounts get settled before people leave on holiday, festive shopping gets paid for, and the new year then brings school fees, insurance premiums, municipal accounts and subscription renewals all at once. Each of those payments must land against the correct customer account. This November, Pay@, the Stellenbosch payments company behind bill payments since 2007, is putting the spotlight on the step in collections that quietly creates the most pressure: reconciliation.
With money flowing in through numerous channels at the same time, finance staff can lose days trying to pair each payment with its account. Pay@ has designed its service to take most of that effort away, checking payments at the moment they are made and reporting them back in a format that lines up with the biller’s own records.
The cost of an unmatched payment at peak time
An unmatched payment causes trouble for everyone involved. The customer thinks the account is paid, yet the biller sees an outstanding balance alongside an unidentified deposit. During a slow month, staff can resolve these cases manually. During a peak season, they accumulate fast, holding up confirmations, triggering queries and pulling people away from serving customers.
Across its whole payment network, Pay@ reports a reconciliation matching rate of 99.995%. The number is a product of how the system works. Customers pay with a unique Pay@ reference number, and when a payment is made to a valid account number it is verified, the amount is validated and a notification goes out immediately. Billers can therefore see who has paid, and what they have paid, as the money arrives.
Choosing an integration route
Operating as a payment solutions provider, Pay@ gives billers a choice of two integration options to suit the way their systems run.
Option one is the Online API. Validation and payment notifications are delivered in real time to an endpoint the business supplies. As soon as a customer pays, Pay@ confirms the account number is valid, validates the amount and alerts the biller without delay.
Option two is file-based. The biller shares account numbers, customer details and amounts due with Pay@, which then validates payments locally and delivers a reconciliation file of payments received at day end or at an agreed interval. It is a natural fit for billers whose systems process in batches instead of in real time.
Smaller businesses can use Pay@’s self-service solution, creating invoices and managing payments through a dedicated payment portal. That option caters to businesses handling up to roughly 10,000 transactions a month, while the enterprise integration is designed for anything from 10,000 to over 100,000 transactions monthly.
Meeting customers where they read their bills
Getting paid begins earlier than the payment, with how the bill reaches the customer. Through Pay@’s gateway, bills can be delivered as printed invoices, PDFs, SMSes, QR codes, payment links, in-app, on the web or via USSD. Pay@’s support systems handle the whole transaction from start to finish, covering bill presentment, real-time bill validation, payment confirmation and daily reporting.
That range becomes especially useful over the holidays, when many customers are out of town, on the road or using a phone instead of a computer. An SMS carrying a payment link, or a QR code ready to scan, makes paying on the go far simpler.
A single connection to dozens of channels
Billers that connect to Pay@ gain access to over 40 payment networks spanning retail, banking and digital partners. Customers can pay at a wide network of retail stores, or online through banking apps, mobile network operators and other digital payment providers. Cash, card, EFT and mobile money are all supported, and billers receive a single settlement covering every payment.
On the digital side, Pay@ has partnered with Capitec so that Capitec clients can pay online in their banking app with nothing more than their registered cell number, keeping their banking details private. Pay@ has also collaborated with the City of Cape Town on PayThat, which makes paying traffic fines safer and faster.
For billers looking for payment solutions able to serve customers from every population group, this mix of physical and digital points of sale sits at the heart of what Pay@ provides. The company describes its offering as the region’s largest payment network across both physical and digital points of sale.
Pricing that tracks volume
There are no setup fees and no recurring subscription fees on Pay@’s integrated solution. Billers are charged only a fee per transaction. That makes life easier for any business deciding whether to open new payment channels ahead of a busy stretch, because cost moves with usage. A biller with a December surge and a slower February pays for the volume it actually processes, instead of covering a fixed monthly fee for capacity it only needs some of the time.
Nearly two decades in payments
Pay@ has been processing transactions across Southern Africa since 2007, with coverage that includes Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia. The company is an authorised financial services provider, FSP No 29423, as well as a certified Third Party Payment Provider. Insurers, financial services providers, broadcasters, municipalities and money transfer businesses are among its clients.
Pay@’s advice to businesses seeking a reliable payment provider before the festive season and the year ahead is that collection is not finished once a customer has paid. It is finished once that payment has been matched, confirmed and recorded, which is exactly the job automated reconciliation is built to do.
Find out more at https://payat.co.za
About Pay@
Pay@ is a South African payments company that helps billers collect payments from customers across retail, banking, mobile and digital channels. Established in 2007 and located at Suite 4, Old College Building, 35 Church Street, Stellenbosch, the company provides integrated and self-service collection solutions, a payment gateway for eCommerce stores and a white-labelled platform-as-a-service. Pay@ links billers to more than 40 payment networks and processes transactions in South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia. It is an authorised financial services provider (FSP No 29423) and a certified Third Party Payment Provider.
Media Contact
Pay@
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +27 21 886 5557
Website: https://payat.co.za
