Think about what actually happens at checkout. A South African consumer finds what they want, adds it to their cart, and then stops. In 2024, the cart abandonment rate for South African e-commerce sat between 83% and 83.5%, well above the global average. Depending on how you count it, that means somewhere between eight and nine of every ten people who get close to buying don’t. The industry talks about this as a conversion problem, but it’s worth being more precise about what’s actually happening. A customer who has navigated to a product, chosen a size or a variant, and clicked “add to cart” is not a casual browser. They’ve already made most of the decision. Something at the point of payment is undoing it.
That something is almost always structural rather than motivational. More than 90% of South Africans used a payment method outside of cash or card in the last year. Nearly half have used Pay by Bank or Capitec Pay, and Pay by Bank has become the second-most preferred method for online retail purchases. But most South African merchant checkouts weren’t built to accommodate that shift. They were built for cards, often from a single acquirer, and then modified piecemeal as new payment options emerged. The result is a checkout experience that reflects the history of a merchant’s payment integrations rather than the preferences of the people trying to use it.
This is the problem that Kwik Payments, a South African PSP, is now capitalising on. This week, the company announced it has gone live on ACI Worldwide’s Payments Orchestration Platform, a system that routes transactions across multiple acquirers, payment methods, and geographies from a single integration layer. The announcement is, on its surface, a business-to-business technology story of the kind that travels quickly through payments trade publications and then disappears. But it points to something more interesting about where South African e-commerce actually is, and what it will take to bring its conversion rates into line with what its consumers now expect.
Payment orchestration as a category is not new. It emerged in global markets roughly a decade ago as merchants grew frustrated with the complexity of managing multiple PSP relationships, each with its own integration, its own reconciliation format, and its own failure modes. The proposition was straightforward: put an intelligent routing layer on top of all of it, let the system decide in real time which acquirer offers the best chance of a successful transaction for a given card, in a given currency, at a given moment, and route accordingly. Global retailers adopted it quickly because the maths were obvious. An authorisation rate improvement of even a few percentage points, at scale, is a material revenue number.
South Africa arrived at this conversation later, partly because its payments landscape was simpler for longer. Cards dominated, cash remained significant, and the diversity of digital payment methods that characterises markets like India or Brazil hadn’t yet materialised. What’s changed in the past three years is the emergence of account-to-account payment rails like PayShap, the rapid adoption of Capitec Pay and instant EFT products, and the growing consumer expectation that a checkout should offer meaningful choice. Merchants that offer at least three payment methods see up to 25% higher checkout conversion rates, which is a figure that sounds obvious until you consider how many South African merchants still don’t meet that threshold, or meet it with methods that aren’t actually the ones their customers prefer.
The Kwik-ACI partnership is built on ACI’s platform handling what has become genuinely difficult to manage in-house: intelligent routing across acquirers, real-time fraud scoring that the press release says evaluates more than a thousand data points per transaction, and reconciliation automation that reduces manual effort significantly. For a growing PSP like Kwik, the alternative to licensing this infrastructure is building it, which requires engineering resources, acquirer relationships, and time that most payments companies at this stage of growth don’t have in the quantities required. Accessing it through a platform like ACI’s is a rational choice, and the claimed deployment time of one to two weeks for new merchants, compared to months under traditional multi-provider implementations, is the part of this story that matters most to the South African merchants who are Kwik’s actual customers.
The conversion uplift figure in the announcement deserves a note. The claim that merchants can see “more than 20%” improvement in conversion sits in the press release as an unqualified number, which is the kind of figure that tends to be true in specific conditions and misleading as a general promise. Baseline matters enormously. A merchant with a badly configured single-acquirer checkout, no local payment methods, and a clunky user interface has a lot of room to improve. A merchant that has already done the work on checkout design and payment method diversity will see a smaller delta. The orchestration layer helps most where the existing infrastructure is weakest, which in South Africa’s case is often among mid-sized merchants who’ve grown faster than their payment stack could keep up with.
What’s more structurally significant than any single conversion estimate is the direction this reflects. Across African markets, the shift has moved from consumer-facing applications toward financial infrastructure and embedded services, with programmable payment APIs, settlement tooling, and cross-border remittance interfaces attracting the most serious capital and the most durable businesses. Kwik’s strategy fits that pattern: rather than compete on consumer brand or merchant acquisition at the surface level, it’s acquiring enterprise-grade infrastructure and offering it to merchants who can’t access it directly. ACI works with institutions at a scale that most local PSPs don’t reach. The partnership gives Kwik’s merchant clients a level of routing intelligence and fraud detection that would otherwise be out of reach.
For the South African merchant running an online store, the practical implication is narrower but real. The payments landscape has diversified faster than most checkout experiences have, and the gap between what consumers now expect and what they encounter at checkout is where most of that 83% abandonment rate lives. Closing it doesn’t require a grand rethinking of digital commerce. It requires a checkout that can accept the payment the customer actually wants to use, route it through a path that maximises the chance of success, and do so without making the customer wait through friction they have no patience for. That’s an infrastructure problem, and Kwik is positioning itself as part of the infrastructure answer.
Whether it can deliver consistently on that positioning at scale, across the range of merchants it intends to serve, is the question that the next twelve to eighteen months will answer. Orchestration platforms work well when they’re properly configured and maintained. They underperform when the acquirer relationships feeding them aren’t competitive, when the routing logic isn’t tuned to local payment method behaviour, or when the merchant’s own checkout design creates friction that no amount of back-end intelligence can fix. The platform is proven. Whether Kwik can deploy it consistently, across a diverse merchant base, at the speed it’s promising, is a different question entirely.