In this expert-opinion-driven piece, Jonatan Allbäck, CEO and Co-Founder of NjiaPay, a payment orchestration company catering to the needs of African businesses, shares not only theory but also real market data proving that your payment gateway is a growth lever, not a cost center.
Nobody builds an online store hoping customers will abandon it at the last click. Yet that’s exactly where many businesses still lose sales: the customer was ready to buy, marketing and logistics had already done their job, and then the checkout got in the way.
That gap between “the sale is essentially won” and “the sale actually closes” is where payment gateways earn their keep — or fail to. And nowhere is that clearer than in markets where customer payment behavior doesn’t map neatly onto a single dominant method, depending on multiple factors, including region or income, which is exactly the situation in South Africa, but also in many other countries around the world. Jonatan Allbäck, CEO and Co-Founder of NjiaPay, shared his perspective on why payment infrastructure deserves to be treated as a growth lever rather than a line-item expense.
The market case for treating checkout as strategy
Africa’s digital payments economy is not a niche bet. Mastercard estimates the continent’s digital payments market could reach $1.5 trillion by 2030. In turn, AfricaNenda’s 2025 State of Inclusive Instant Payment Systems report found that 36 instant payment systems across 31 African countries processed 64 billion transactions in 2024. That volume is already flowing through checkouts; the question is how much of it each business actually captures versus loses to friction.
“Payments are no longer an unnecessary evil but have become a clear lever for improving conversion, retaining customers and growing revenue,” Allbäck says. “Brands like Apple, Burberry, Nike, Netflix and Uber began treating payments as a strategic part of their business a decade ago.”
The data backs that framing up. Apple Pay’s own case studies show the pattern across several retail rollouts: desktop conversions rose by at least 15% and mobile conversions by 20% after integration, with Stripe reporting more than double the conversion rate and checkout completing 58% faster once Apple Pay was added. That single decision — treating one-touch authentication as a growth feature rather than a payments footnote, is the same logic Uber later built its entire checkout strategy around. The company now treats whether to support a given payment method as a strategic decision rather than a technical limitation or cost barrier, running continuous experiments on how checkout changes affect conversion. Uber has also seen the direct impact of payment orchestration logic on their daily operations:
“We built a checkout layer to allow LOBs* access to the Uber payment ecosystem via one connection. This introduced a new layer in our systems to hold checkout business logic and act as an orchestrator. Any payment method support or need for a cross-LOB change can now be implemented once by a single team.”
Felipe Fiali de Sá, Principal Software Engineer at Uber
Note: *LOB – line of business
For subscription businesses like Netflix, the stakes of payment-as-strategy show up differently — in renewal failures rather than first-time checkout. Industry data shows failed payments cost subscription businesses between 5% and 15% of recurring revenue every month, and that involuntary churn, i.e. customers who unintentionally lapse due to billing issues, can account for 20% to 40% of all churn at subscription companies. Acting on that data, rather than treating a declined card as a closed case, is precisely the difference Allbäck is describing.
A modern white-label or orchestration-based payment gateway is what makes that kind of strategic treatment operationally possible for a business that isn’t Apple or Uber. Routing logic, method-level customization, and cascading across providers are an affordable way for a mid-sized merchant to get the same checkout flexibility that used to require a dedicated payments team.
Why “more payment methods” isn’t the same as “the right payment methods”
The instinctive move for a lot of merchants is to add every payment method available, on the assumption that more options always mean more conversions.
Allbäck argues the opposite is closer to true: “Businesses are tempted to offer as many methods as possible in the belief that more choice means more convenience. But a better approach would be to understand what customers use, and then focus on the methods that support conversion, trust and simplicity.”
In our earlier study, PaySpace Magazine Global also concluded that more payment options do not always translate to more money or sales. Merchants offering multiple payment methods and, more importantly, choosing the ones their target audience prefers can increase conversion rates up to 30%. However, simply adding all possible payment methods to checkout may have an adverse effect and scare prospective buyers away. The desired payment methods’ versatility depends on the market and is not universal.
South Africa is a useful test case precisely because it doesn’t have one or two obvious defaults. For South African online businesses, Allbäck suggests the right mix “may include options such as cards, Capitec Pay, Apple Pay or Google Pay, EFT, buy-now-pay-later and vouchers, depending on the customer base” — and specifically stresses that “the mix will differ by business, but payment options should help customers complete purchases and not simply appear because they are available.”
This is precisely the layer where gateway choice stops being a backend decision and starts being a customer-experience one. A merchant relying on a single fixed integration is locked into whatever method set that integration shipped with. A merchant on an orchestration layer with method-level routing can run EFT and Capitec Pay for price-sensitive local shoppers, card-on-file for repeat customers, and BNPL for higher-ticket items, as an example, and adjust that mix by segment, geography, or even time of day, without re-engineering the checkout each time.
The revenue case for reducing friction
The argument isn’t just qualitative. Allbäck cites payment optimization data showing that one-click and card-on-file payments deliver a 15% improvement in approval rates compared with one-off card transactions, a 12% improvement in conversion rates, and an estimated 10 to 15% overall revenue uplift. BNPL providers, separately, report average order value increases of 20 to 30%.
Those are gateway-enabled outcomes, not marketing outcomes. Card-on-file and one-click flows depend on tokenization and stored-credential handling that sit squarely inside the payment infrastructure layer, which is exactly why the gateway a business picks shapes how much of that uplift it can actually realize, and how quickly.
Where the real cost actually hides
This also reframes how the affordability of a payment setup should be measured.
“The real cost of payments includes everything from provider, bank and gateway fees to the reconciliation time, settlement delays, integration maintenance, support queries, fraud losses, chargebacks, false positives, refunds, failed payments and abandoned carts,” Allbäck notes. “A payment setup can look cheap and still be expensive.”
A gateway that’s marginally more expensive per transaction but supports better routing, broader local method coverage, and lower decline rates can easily outperform a cheaper one on total cost, because the cheaper option’s real cost shows up downstream, in finance team rework and lost customers, rather than on the upfront invoice.
Measure it like a growth channel, not a utility bill
Allbäck’s closing point is the one with the most direct operational consequence: payments should be tracked with the same rigor as any other growth channel.
“Online businesses should track approval rates, conversion, cart abandonment, chargebacks, refunds, fraud, support tickets, churn, customer lifetime value and acquisition cost,” he says. “These are not just technical metrics, but they show businesses where revenue leaks out.”
For a business already running a white-label or orchestrated gateway, most of that data is already sitting in the platform’s reporting layer. The gap is usually in whether anyone treats it as a growth dashboard rather than an ops report. Other payment experts agree on that point:
“Most small business owners aren’t short on data. They’re short on time. They’re juggling staffing issues, customer demands, inventory, and a hundred other operational pressures every day, so payments data often becomes something they collect without fully using. The real opportunity is helping business owners turn that information into practical decisions, save time, and make running the business feel more manageable. That’s where payments technology can become a real operational partner instead of just another backend system.”
Nick Bencivenga, VP of Sales at Kurv
The underlying shift Allbäck is describing isn’t just exclusively about South Africa (though it’s a vivid illustration), or about any other singled-out regional payment-method mix. It’s that the gateway layer with routing, method customization, tokenization, cascading, and more, is the mechanism that turns “know your customer’s payment preferences” from a nice idea into something a business can actually act on, market by market, without rebuilding checkout each time. South Africa just happens to be a market where the cost of getting that wrong is unusually visible.
