A “credit push” (credit payment) transaction involves the payer instructing their bank to initiate the payment. The bank then forwards both the payment instruction and the funds to the receiving bank, which deposits the amount into the beneficiary’s account.

Over the last decade, the need to modernise South Africa’s low-value electronic credit payment systems became more pressing, and in 2018, through an industry project called “Project Future” a target state architecture for credit payments based on a unified payments platform architecture was established. This meant that new technologies, messaging standards, and business processes needed to be developed and implemented. In 2019, the Rapid Payments Programme (RPP) was established to facilitate the design and implementation of the future state target architecture.

In March 2023, the first set of services on Rapid Payments was introduced to South Africa, PayShap, which enables the real time credit transfer using traditional account information or through Pay by Proxy (known as the ShapID), allowing easier credit transfers using a reference like a mobile number. In October 2024, Rapid Payments launched Request to Pay or PayShap Request, which allows South Africans to request payments from others.