South African shoppers can now skip the frustrating redirect to their bank and the one-time PINs that slow down online card payments and instead approve a purchase with a simple biometric check on their phone. Walletdoc, one of South Africa’s leading payment technology companies, is bringing Visa Payment Passkeys to local merchants, enabling them to offer shoppers a faster, more secure and passwordless online checkout.
The rollout builds on Walletdoc’s reputation for being first to market and pioneering payment innovation and marks its next step in removing friction and fraud from digital commerce.
Shoppers often abandon their baskets when checkout has too many steps. Visa Payment Passkeys remove that friction. Instead of typing a one-time PIN or switching to a banking app to approve a payment, customers verify a purchase with a quick face scan, fingerprint or device PIN, exactly as they would unlock their phone.
Setting up is simple – with just a few taps, a customer creates a passkey. The next time they shop with that card on their device, they use the passkey to verify the purchase. This approach is phishing-resistant and privacy-preserving as the passkey stays on the customer’s device, and their biometric details are never shared.
Today, most online card payments in South Africa are protected by 3D Secure (3DS), which sends shoppers to their bank to approve a payment before returning them to the store. As a business that built its own 3DS technology, Walletdoc knows this process well. Visa Payment Passkeys build on that same trusted security while removing the extra steps that cost merchants sales.
For merchants, that seamless experience means more completed purchases, fewer declines and happier customers. According to Visa, biometric authentication can reduce fraud by up to 50% compared with SMS one-time PINs. Every major operating system and 90% of web browsers already support the standard behind Visa Payment Passkeys, across an estimated four billion consumer devices worldwide. Merchants can connect seamlessly through Walletdoc, without building their own technology.
Dan Wagner, Joint CEO of Walletdoc says: “At Walletdoc we believe payments should be simple, secure and effortless for the customer. By bringing Visa Payment Passkeys to South African shoppers, we’re once again at the forefront of how the country pays online, giving shoppers the security of biometrics with the simplicity of a single tap, and giving our merchants a proven way to reduce fraud while converting more sales. This is the future of checkout, now available to our customers.”
Vinesh Ramnarain, Vice President: Product and Solutions, Visa Sub-Saharan Africa, adds: “For years, the industry has faced a fundamental challenge in digital commerce: how to make authentication stronger without making the customer journey more complicated. Visa Payment Passkeys represent a significant step forward because they combine robust, phishing-resistant security with an experience that feels intuitive to consumers. By replacing passwords, OTPs and app-based approvals with biometrics already native to a customer’s device, we’re helping make online payments faster, safer and much more seamless. We are pleased to see Walletdoc bringing this innovation to South African merchants and consumers at scale.”
Visa Payment Passkeys also complement the digital wallets Walletdoc already supports, including Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay, extending the same fast, biometric experience to all Visa card payments, not just wallet transactions.
Visa Payment Passkeys are now available to merchants on the Walletdoc platform: a simpler, safer way to pay with Visa. Merchants interested in enabling passwordless, biometric checkout can contact Walletdoc to get started.