Designing for Trust: How user-centric design will shape South Africa’s digital payments future
August 14, 2025
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South Africa’s digital payments landscape is evolving with modern rails such as PayShap Request, alongside growth in crypto-enabled payments. These advances are opening new ways for South Africans to transact, giving them greater choice and accessibility.
However, adoption still depends on whether these services are simple, secure, and trusted. The South African Reserve Bank’s Payments Study Report 2023 found that only a third of South Africans have no difficulty adopting electronic or digital financial methods.
Smartphone penetration is high, with over 91% of South Africans owning a device, yet many hesitate at the point of payment. This is where user-centric design can make the difference between adoption and abandonment.
Why user-centric design is essential in South Africa
In a market where digital literacy varies, people need payment experiences that are clear and easy to follow. Poorly designed journeys create unnecessary barriers, while effective ones enable seamless completion.
Strong payment experiences are:
- Intuitive: clear steps and plain language that guide the user
- Consistent: predictable patterns across screens and service
- Accessible: visual cues and guided prompts that work across languages and literacy levels
- Secure and trusted: clear signals of safety and confirmation at key points in the journey
Why WhatsApp is a strong channel
WhatsApp is the most used social platform in South Africa and is trusted by users across all demographics. Integrating payment journeys into WhatsApp keeps users in a familiar environment, lowering barriers to exploring digital services. Guided, conversational flows can help first-time users’ complete payments without the need to engage with a new interface.
Case study: Designing Ozow’s PayShap Request flow
Ozow’s PayShap Request flow was built to meet users where they are:
- Simple identifiers: pay using a phone number or account number
- Minimal input: only the information needed to complete the request
- Bank-app approval: users confirm in their trusted banking app
- Clear feedback: real-time prompts and confirmations to support confidence in the process
Ashely Chewins, a UX Designer at Ozow, emphasised the importance of flexibility in building trust:
“The end user was considered in the PayShap Request flow by giving them flexibility of use by allowing them to use either their registered mobile number or their bank account number as their unique identifier for their transaction.”
These design choices align with PayShap’s proxy approach and mirror how South Africans already interact with their banks, helping to build trust through familiarity.
The cost of poor payment UX
Complex steps at checkout have a measurable impact. 16.9% of South African retailers cite a complicated payment process as a major cause of cart abandonment. Andy Higgins, MD at Bob Group, notes that a clear and transparent process is essential to building customer loyalty and enhancing the overall payment experience.
Lessons from e-commerce that can be applied to payments
Online retailers have long understood that small changes to the checkout journey can significantly improve completion rates. In payments, these lessons translate into:
- Using familiar design patterns to reduce hesitation
- Offering trusted options that people already recognise
- Showing costs early to avoid last-minute surprises
- Keeping support visible and easy to access
- Removing unnecessary steps to keep the process moving
In South Africa’s evolving digital payments environment, user-centric design is pivotal to mass adoption and recurring usage. Strong infrastructure and modern rails like PayShap Request are powerful enablers, but their success depends on the customer’s experience.
When payment flows are clear, secure, and aligned to how users already interact with technology, they can shift behaviour, reduce reliance on cash, and accelerate meaningfull adoption of digital payments.
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