Digital challenger bank TymeBank has introduced a PayShap Request payment option that third-party payment service providers can offer to merchants to use with their clients.

According to a statement by the bank on Wednesday, the functionality will give South African businesses “a simple, unique and bank-agnostic” way to receive instant payments from customers at checkout.

“PayShap Request is an important step towards a safer, easier and universal instant payments system for South African businesses and consumers,” said Chris Becker, managing executive for enterprise payments at TymeBank.

“By opening this instant payment type to our third-party payment provider partners as the sponsoring bank, we’re enabling them to give consumers and merchants an … instant payment option that works across all participating banks, directly at checkout.”

The PayShap Request feature makes use of the rapid payments platform developed by PayInc – formerly BankservAfrica – to facilitate instant payments to merchants by first sending customers a payment request that they then approve in their banking app.

Customers can either enter their bank account number, PayShap ID or cellphone number to facilitate the transaction. Once entered, the merchant sends a request that pops up as a push notification in the customer’s banking app.

Approving the transaction makes the payment to the merchant in real time.

Real-time payments

Digital payments processing specialist Ozow on Wednesday announced it has partnered with TymeBank to offer PayShap Request on its platforms. This means that more online shopping platforms that support Ozow payments will offer PayShap Request as one of the payment options to customers at checkout.

Despite being used in a business-to-consumer setting in the TymeBank case, PayShap requests are also available on a consumer-to-consumer basis using a similar process.

Read: What’s holding PayShap back in South Africa

“Our ultimate goal is to give consumers a safe, simple and modern way to pay in real time, while strengthening the national payments system by backing the Reserve Bank’s payments ecosystem modernisation programme and launching PayShap Request for merchants through trusted partners,” said Bekker. – © 2025 NewsCentral Media

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