Payments glossary
Real-time payments
Real-time payments are account-to-account transfers that clear individually in seconds, around the clock, with funds immediately available to the recipient. South Africa's real-time rail is PayShap, operated by BankservAfrica; similar systems run in many markets worldwide.
How real-time rails differ from batch EFT
Traditional EFT gathers payments into batches, exchanges them between banks on a schedule, and reflects funds in one to three business days. A real-time rail processes each payment as its own message: cleared in seconds, confirmed to both parties immediately, and available to spend at once - at night, on weekends, on public holidays. Most real-time systems also support proxy addressing, letting a payer use a mobile number instead of an account number; on PayShap that proxy is the ShapID.
What real-time payments enable
Immediacy changes what account-to-account payments can be used for. Refunds and payouts that once took days - marketplace seller settlements, insurance claims, gig-economy earnings - become instant. Pay-by-bank checkout gains the certainty card payments have always had: the merchant knows, in the moment, that the money has arrived. The counterweight is irrevocability - a real-time payment cannot be quietly recalled, so fraud attention shifts towards scams that trick people into authorising payments themselves.
Real-time payments in South Africa
PayShap launched in 2023, built by BankservAfrica with the country's major banks, and is South Africa's real-time rail for low-value payments. On LekkaPay, PayShap is coming soon as a checkout method - see the PayShap page.
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