South African Mobile Payments Provider SnapScan Buys Payroll Startup Radar

Mobile payments provider SnapScan has bought Radar, a South African human resources and payroll startup, a report from Disrupt Africa said Monday (May 9).

Founders Kobus Ehlers and Gerrit Greeff, spent almost 10 years building payments products for and with banks. They founded SnapScan, which became the biggest mobile payments provider in South Africa, and also founded Radar in 2019 with Richard Oakley as well.

Radar is now bought by Firepay, which is the company behind SnapScan, and a subsidiary of Standard Bank.

The founders will now exit Radar and the rest of the team will join Firepay, the report said.

The deal will reportedly see “a variety of value-added offerings” for customers.

Ehlers said Firepay was one of the original investors in Radar. Both companies, he said, work on solving problems that small- to midsize enterprise (SME) customers deal with.

“There are some very exciting possibilities when you combine our product with the reach and experience of the SnapScan team.”

See also: South Africa’s Zapper Turns Merchant’s Phone Into Tap-and-Pay POS Device

South Africa has been seeing innovations in payments, with another company, Zapper, announcing that merchants on the platform will be able to accept tap-on-phone payments, PYMNTS wrote.

This will allow them to access almost all kinds of digital payments without needing other point-of-sale (POS) hardware. And customers won’t have to have the Zapper app. This will add PIN-on-glass functionality, letting customers who went over their verification limit be able to enter their PIN on an Android phone and go on with the transaction otherwise as normal.

CEO Brett White said the new service lets merchants “accept physical card payments as well as mobile wallet payments, such as Samsung Pay, Apple Pay, Garmin Pay, and others.” He said the pilot phase was done.

White said the app in the past had been used for merchants to get payment confirmations with push notifications in real time, and the new functions will turn the merchant’s phone into a POS device, not needing any other hardware.