And nobody is talking about it! Let me put some numbers on this.
Card payment value in South Africa hit R2.7 trillion in 2024. That market is growing at over 10% a year as more merchants go cashless and more consumers tap to pay. More transactions, more digital payments, more progress — good news all around.
Except if you’re a small business sitting on the merchant side of every one of those taps.
What merchants actually pay
Every card transaction carries a merchant service fee — the slice that goes to the bank, the card network, and the payment processor before the money reaches your account. In South Africa, that fee typically runs between 1.5% and 3% per swipe, depending on your provider, your volume, and the type of card used.
Stack that on a merchant doing R200,000 a month in card sales. At 2%, that’s R4,000 in fees every month. At 3%, it’s R6,000. Over a year, you’re looking at R48,000 to R72,000 — silently extracted, line by line, transaction by transaction.
And that’s before POS rental fees, minimum swipe fees, and settlement charges — which some providers add on top. One industry source notes that on a R50 transaction, total per-swipe costs can hit R4.50. Nearly 10% of the sale.
Compare that to the rest of the world
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.
Europe capped interchange fees at 0.30% for consumer cards. Australia brought them down to 0.50% through regulation. Both regions concluded that high interchange fees were essentially a tax on small businesses — money flowing upward through the payment chain with very little return to the people doing the actual selling.
South Africa has no equivalent cap. Merchants here pay 3 to 10 times the rate their European counterparts do on the same type of transaction.
And under PASA rules, merchants aren’t allowed to add a surcharge to card payments to recover those costs. They absorb the fee silently, and it comes out of margin.
The part that doesn’t get said
South Africa’s payment industry is good at talking about financial inclusion — more people with cards, more merchants going digital, broader access. All of which is true and worth celebrating.
What gets less attention is who’s paying for it.
When a card network charges 2% on every transaction, that cost lands with the merchant. When the merchant can’t pass it on, it comes out of the business. For a small trader running on tight margins, it’s not an invisible rounding error. It’s rent. It’s wages. It’s the stock they couldn’t buy this month.
The infrastructure argument — that fees reflect the cost of building and maintaining secure payment rails — made more sense twenty years ago. Today, instant digital payments are cheaper to run than legacy card systems. The cost structure hasn’t moved in proportion to the technology.
What we’re doing about it
TappiPay was built on a straightforward premise: QR-based payments that settle instantly, at 0.3–0.6% per transaction. No card machine to rent. No waiting two days for Friday’s money. No minimum swipe fees.
We’re not claiming to fix everything overnight. The card rails are entrenched, the habits are entrenched, and consumer behaviour takes time to shift.
But the cost gap is real. The technology to close it exists. And the merchants who’d benefit from it are running businesses right now, absorbing fees that most people in this conversation never have to think about.
If you’re a business owner — what’s your experience? Has the fee structure ever actually changed for you, or have you just learned to price around it?
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