What happens when the largest South African retailer partners with one of the leading South African payment networks? A new platform is born – GetPaid - a platform that enables small business owners to invoice and receive payments seamlessly, anytime, anywhere.

Small businesses face a variety of challenges to ensure long-term profitability, such as recruiting the right talent, managing time effectively, securing funding, processing payments and invoices, reaching clients on limited marketing budgets, and dealing with industry competition. These operational hurdles are mostly expected when starting a small business. However, the strain that delayed payments or high payment processing costs place on one’s cash flow surprises many small-to-medium business owners.

According to the Xero State of Small Business Report 2024, around 24% of small businesses experience cash flow issues, with 72% of those affected having to resort to personal funds to keep operations running. Late or delayed payments have a severely negative effect on the financial stability of SMEs and cost small business owners valuable money, time, and growth opportunities.

An innovative partnership to benefit small businesses

Pay@, South Africa’s largest payment network of physical and digital point-of-sale locations across all population groups, has always been supportive of our country’s small business owners. By powering bill payments with technology that is enabled with a single-integration onboarding process, over 35 of the country’s most trusted retailers depend on Pay@’s customer-centric platform.

As a prominent South African retailer, Shoprite Group shares Pay@’s ongoing efforts to make financial products and services more accessible and affordable to customers, especially for SMEs. With a longstanding foundation of trust and collaboration spanning several years, these organisations partnered on an innovative project to develop a fast, reliable, and cost-effective payment solution that extends the retailer’s Money Market offering. This is how GetPaid was born – a game-changer in South Africa’s payment space.

The combination of Shoprite’s extensive retail network and Pay@’s trusted payment aggregation services laid the foundation for a scalable platform that supports and empowers small businesses by offering them simple and effective ways to manage their payments as well as make payments more accessible and affordable for small businesses.

At last, contractors, freelancers, market stall owners, and small business owners no longer have to struggle with payment delays, high costs associated with traditional card machines, or expensive hardware.

By leveraging Shoprite’s established payment infrastructure, GetPaid enables businesses to instantly receive payments and provides them with access to over 29,000 till points nationwide, making cash flow management more effective and efficient. With the new GetPaid self-service platform, small businesses can also generate digital invoices, payment links, or unique scan-to-pay QR codes on their phone or computer while managing bulk payments and tracking cash flow through a user-friendly dashboard.

With a simple online registration process and zero fees for setup and monthly usage, small businesses can immediately start creating customised invoices, generating QR codes, and sending payment links via SMS, email, or WhatsApp after completing a quick KYC and AVS process.

Realising an inclusive financial ecosystem
Currently, GetPaid is only available in the South African market, but opportunities will be explored to expand the service into other African regions. Providing scalable, accessible payment solutions to small businesses is a key step in Pay@’s mission to enhance financial inclusion in both South Africa and the broader continent.

By partnering with Shoprite Group and leveraging its extensive retail presence, Pay@ aims to bridge gaps in financial access, helping small businesses and entrepreneurs thrive in the digital economy while contributing to a more inclusive financial ecosystem.