Capitec has added recurring subscription payments to Capitec Pay, its account-to-account payment method, through an integration with EBANX.

EBANX, a payment technology company focused on emerging markets, worked with the bank to build the recurring version of Capitec Pay, extending it into cross-border payment flows for international merchants.

The integration allowed Canva to connect to a South African payment rail without building local infrastructure of its own, billing users directly from their bank accounts with no credit card required.

Capitec Pay lets customers approve a recurring payment once inside the Capitec banking app.

After that single authorisation, participating merchants can collect future subscription payments automatically, without the customer re-entering card details.

“For Canva, going live as the first global merchant on this infrastructure is a removal of a structural barrier that was preventing a large portion of South Africans from accessing our platform at all,”

said Bianca Sibiya, Canva’s Africa lead.

“For years, card-based billing has been treated as the default model for global subscription products, but that default was built around consumer behaviour in the United States and Western Europe, not South Africa,”

said Wiza Jalakasi, commercial lead for Africa and the Middle East at EBANX.

Capitec has framed the Canva partnership as an extension of a payment experience its clients already use, giving them access to international merchants without leaving that familiar app environment.

EBANX now supports recurring alternative payment methods (APMs) across 12 emerging markets, including South Africa, giving merchants a route to more than a billion consumers who often lack credit or debit cards.

Featured image credit: Edited by Fintech News UAE, based on image by meshcube via Magnific