South Africa’s Clunky P2P Payments Setup Evades Long-Overdue Disruption

In 2017, two business partners got to finally hit the “launch” button on a delicate and precious project after several months of hard work in South Africa.  That year, they kicked off a fintech venture called Slide; a peer-to-peer (P2P) payments app that allows users to send money to friends and family using their mobile number or email.

The duo, Alon Stern and Terence Goldberg, had been living in the United States for years before returning to South Africa, where they tasked themselves with solving a problem that they thought was too big to ignore.

As individuals who had lived in the U.S. and become accustomed to third-party P2P payment apps like Venmo, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Cash App, the business partners figured it was something of an unacceptable anomaly that South Africa, despite being well ahead in terms of banking infrastructure and mobile access, simply hadn’t seen any reliable, popular P2P payment app implementations.

Obviously, they set out to buil...