South Africa’s consumers have spent the past few years ditching cash for taps, virtual cards and even payment rings. The country’s businesses, by and large, have not. That is the gap Visa is now targeting, announcing the local launch of Visa Commercial Pay in partnership with First National Bank and Rand Merchant Bank.
The platform is a virtual card-based business-to-business payments system designed to handle supplier payments, corporate travel and day-to-day operational spend through a single channel. It issues secure virtual cards, automates reconciliation and gives finance teams real-time visibility over what is being spent and by whom.
Visa is positioning corporate payments as the next part of the economy to be digitised, after a consumer shift that is already well advanced.
That consumer shift is well documented. The SpendTrend2025 report from Discovery Bank and Visa found that 45% of surveyed consumers now use virtual cards, that more than 80% reach for a card whenever they can and that 67% use cash only a few times a month or never.
FNB has pushed virtual cards out to its full customer base. Corporate back offices, by contrast, have stayed manual, with supplier payments, travel bookings and expense claims often spread across disconnected systems with little real-time oversight.
Visa estimates that the local digital payments market is worth roughly US$10-billion, a figure it ties to rising mobile and online adoption and a broader move away from cash.
Rapid growth
The company has separately said that AI, crypto and biometrics are reshaping how South Africans pay. Independent estimates of the market vary by definition and scope, but all point in the same direction: rapid, sustained growth. The corporate segment is where the friction is now, in the reconciliation, governance and spend-control work that still eats finance teams’ time.
Lineshree Moodley, country head for Visa South Africa, described the launch as a big development for the local market. “With Visa Commercial Pay, we are introducing a scalable, data-rich platform that brings together payments, control and insights into one seamless experience – enabling smarter business decisions, unlocking working capital and strengthening supplier ecosystems,” she said.
For the banks, the appeal is in handing corporate clients tighter control. Security is a recurring theme, too. The platform leans on tokenisation and virtual card technology, and Visa has previously pointed to data showing fraud incidents are around six times lower on digital wallet transactions than on physical cards.
For now, the partnership is limited to FNB and RMB, both part of the FirstRand stable. Asked whether the platform will extend to other local banks, Visa said the launch has been confirmed only with FNB and RMB, and that it was “not yet aware of any plans to extend the launch to other local banks”.
The question now is adoption. Consumer payment habits shifted quickly once the tools were easy to use and visibly safer. Will corporate finance teams move as fast? — © 2026 NewsCentral Media
