The South African Reserve Bank’s QR+ programme is moving from policy direction towards implementation, giving small businesses a potential way to simplify how customers pay across different providers. The opportunity for owners and sales teams is broader than payment acceptance: a cleaner payment experience can also create a more reliable point for recording customer activity and planning the next interaction.
In a speech on 20 October 2026, SARB Governor Lesetja Kganyago identified QR+ as one of four initiatives supporting payment-system modernisation. He said the system is intended to provide an interoperable merchant-presented code, allowing customers to pay through the service of their choice. A QR+ pilot is planned for the first quarter of 2027. Read the SARB Governor’s address.
What QR+ changes
The SARB published version 1.2 of the QR+ Standard on 7 July 2026. The standard supports payment initiation through QR codes, barcodes and digital links, rather than limiting the experience to a single format. Version 1.2 also introduces a PayShap payload to support structured data exchange between the QR+ application programming interface and the selected payment rail.
The standard is designed to reduce fragmentation between payment service providers, payment rails and stores of value. It does not execute the payment itself; instead, it passes standardised initiation information to the selected rail, which processes the transaction. See the QR+ Standard 1.2 overview.
The follow-up lesson for small businesses
QR+ is still a developing infrastructure project, so businesses should not treat it as an immediate guarantee of lower costs, wider acceptance or automatic customer-data access. The practical lesson is to prepare the process around the payment rather than waiting for the technology to solve the operating problem.
- Capture the source of the enquiry. Record whether a contact came from a website, social post, event, referral, quote request or in-person interaction.
- Separate payment from consent. A completed payment does not automatically create permission for unrelated marketing. Keep marketing permissions, preferences and unsubscribe requests recorded separately.
- Define the next action. After payment, the next step may be a delivery update, onboarding message, service review or relevant product invitation. Assign an owner and due date.
- Review the handover. Check whether payment records, customer details and follow-up tasks are reaching the same shared workflow without duplicate manual capturing.
Why the timing matters
SARB says PayShap has passed 1 billion transactions since its 2023 launch, but also notes that digital payments remain far from universal and that merchant acceptance is still an important barrier. The bank’s stated aim is to make digital payments simpler and more affordable, including for small businesses that may not want to invest in dedicated point-of-sale equipment.
For owners, the sensible response is to treat payment modernisation as an operations question. A payment channel can make it easier to complete a transaction, but revenue is still affected by what happens before and after that transaction: whether the enquiry is assigned, whether the customer receives the promised information and whether a useful next step is scheduled.
A shared CRM can support that chain by keeping leads and contacts together, recording consent, assigning follow-up tasks and linking communications to the customer record. If your team is reviewing email sequences or post-payment follow-up, talk through a setup that matches your current process rather than assuming a new payment standard will remove every handover.
