Instant payments: the foundation for AI commerce in SA

Liberia just pulled off something most digital transformation teams only talk about: a central bank-led, interoperable instant payments platform built and deployed fast enough to matter.

The Central Bank of Liberia’s new Inclusive Instant Payments System (IIPS) connects mobile money providers into a real-time network, built on Mojaloop (open-source payments infrastructure). The headline number is hard to ignore: 73 business days to deploy the first Government-to-Person payments use case, and 111 days to reach Person-to-Person interoperability.

If you’re running (or building) an online store, marketplace, or digital service in South Africa, this isn’t just a nice regional success story. It’s a reminder that AI-powered e-commerce doesn’t start with AI. It starts with reliable rails: instant settlement, interoperability, clean transaction data, and systems that don’t trap customers in one wallet or one bank. Once those basics are in place, AI can finally do what it’s supposed to do—improve conversion, reduce fraud, personalise service, and automate operations.

Liberia’s IIPS proves speed and interoperability are strategic

Answer first: Liberia’s IIPS shows that national-scale interoperability can be delivered quickly when the platform is open, the governance is clear, and the use cases are practical.

The IIPS launch matters for two reasons beyond Liberia’s borders.

First, it attacked the most stubborn friction in many African payment ecosystems: closed loops. In Liberia, limited interoperability meant people often carried two phones—one for each major mobile money operator—just to transact. IIPS changes that by enabling mobile money transfers between Lone Star Cell MTN and Orange Liberia, and setting a path to connect banks, fintechs, and government agencies.

Second, it proves that execution time can be compressed without compromising ambition. A lot of payment modernisation projects fail quietly because they try to do everything in phase one. Liberia’s approach—start with G2P, then expand to P2P and broader integration—gets value into citizens’ hands early, which builds trust and momentum.

The data point that matters: account growth creates demand for rails

Answer first: Once digital accounts cross the 50% threshold, instant payments stop being “nice to have” and become critical infrastructure.

Liberia’s progress in access is a signal. According to the World Bank Global Findex (2024), Liberia reached 52% account ownership by 2024, surpassing a 50% target early—driven largely by mobile wallets (reported as over 11 million wallets). When participation is that broad, payment friction becomes an economy-wide tax.

South Africa is already ahead on many metrics—card penetration, EFT usage, and sophisticated fintech adoption. Yet in e-commerce, you still see customers abandon carts when:

• a payment method isn’t available
• a wallet can’t pay a merchant easily
• settlement is slow or “pending” for too long
• refunds take days
• fraud controls are either too weak (losses) or too strict (false declines)

Interoperable, near-real-time payments reduce these pain points, and—crucially for this series—create the high-quality, high-frequency transaction data that AI systems learn from.

Why open-source payments infrastructure matters for AI in e-commerce

Answer first: Open infrastructure lowers integration costs and increases competition, which gives South African businesses more payment choice—and better data for AI-driven decisions.

Mojaloop’s role in IIPS isn’t just a technical detail; it’s a strategy. Open-source infrastructure tends to push ecosystems toward:

1. Standardised APIs (so integration is repeatable)
2. Interoperability by design (so customers can pay across networks)
3. Faster iteration (because improvements don’t wait for a single vendor)

That parallels how many South African teams are adopting AI: not as a single monolithic product, but as a set of tools—model APIs, vector search, automation platforms, and analytics—assembled into workflows.

Here’s what I’ve found in practice: AI projects stall when the underlying systems are closed. If your payments provider can’t expose clean events (authorisation, settlement, refunds, chargebacks) or you can’t reconcile quickly, your “AI personalisation” ends up being guesswork.

What “payment data readiness” looks like (and why it beats “more data”)

Answer first: AI in e-commerce works when payment events are consistent, timely, and reconcilable—not when you simply collect more fields.

If you want AI to improve customer engagement in South African e-commerce, prioritise these payment data capabilities:

• Real-time status updates (authorised, failed, reversed, refunded)
• Consistent identifiers across order, customer, and payment records
• Refund and dispute visibility with timestamps and reasons
• Channel tagging (web, app, WhatsApp commerce, in-store QR)
• Interoperable customer identifiers (so wallets/banks don’t fragment profiles)

Liberia’s IIPS is a payments story, but the deeper lesson is a data one: interoperability improves the continuity of a customer’s financial behaviour across channels.

Financial inclusion first, AI engagement next

Answer first: Inclusion expands your addressable market; AI helps you serve that larger market profitably.

Liberia’s stated goal is to digitise the national economy and improve interoperability for rural and underbanked communities. That’s not charity. It’s smart economic design.

South African e-commerce has its own inclusion gap. Many customers prefer payment methods that feel immediate and controllable: wallets, pay-by-bank flows, QR-based payments, or cash alternatives. When those options are fragmented, the business cost shows up as:

• higher support volumes (“Where’s my payment?”)
• higher fraud exposure (manual overrides, social engineering)
• lower repeat purchase rates (customers don’t trust the flow)

Once inclusive payment options are stable, AI becomes much more valuable because it can work across the whole funnel:

• AI customer service can confirm payment status instantly, reducing tickets.
• AI marketing automation can trigger “recovered checkout” messages based on real payment failure reasons (not generic reminders).
• AI credit and risk models can price risk using behaviour and repayment signals, not proxies.

A line from the Liberia announcement captures the impact in plain terms: salary processing that took seven days can now take seconds. That delta—days to seconds—is where new digital services show up.

Practical South African use cases that depend on instant payments

Answer first: The most profitable AI use cases often require fast payments and fast confirmation.

If you’re in South Africa building AI-driven e-commerce or digital services, these are the quick wins that become realistic when payment confirmation is near real-time:

1. Instant fulfilment decisions: ship, reserve stock, or release a digital subscription immediately.
2. Smarter fraud prevention: combine device signals with payment velocity (rapid-fire attempts, unusual refund cycles).
3. Dynamic incentives: offer a small discount only when the customer chooses a lower-cost payment rail.
4. Automated refunds: issue immediate refunds to reduce chargebacks and support escalations.
5. Personalised payment UX: show the top two methods a customer is most likely to complete successfully.

None of these requires “fancy AI.” They require dependable payments plus decent event data.

Ecosystems beat vendors: the collaboration model worth copying

Answer first: Liberia’s IIPS is a case study in ecosystem execution—central bank leadership, local implementation, and shared standards.

The IIPS launch brought together the Central Bank of Liberia, the Mojaloop Foundation, ThitsaWorks, and AfricaNenda, along with mobile money operators and a roadmap to connect commercial banks and national payment systems.

That structure matters. When payment modernisation is treated as a shared platform (not a vendor product), you get better alignment on:

• governance and rules
• dispute handling and consumer protection
• onboarding standards (KYC tiers, fraud reporting)
• service-level expectations (uptime, reversals, settlement windows)

South African businesses can copy the same pattern on a smaller scale, even without building national infrastructure. The play is to create a payments + data ecosystem across your stack:

• your PSP(s) and wallet partners
• your commerce platform
• your CRM and marketing automation
• your fraud tooling
• your support channels (including AI chat)

The outcome you want is simple: one view of the customer’s payment reality, not five disconnected dashboards.

A 90-day “payments-to-AI” roadmap for SA e-commerce teams

Answer first: You don’t need a national switch to benefit; you need interoperability-minded design and a disciplined rollout.

Here’s a practical plan I’d back for many South African mid-market retailers and digital services.

Days 1–30: Fix the plumbing

• Audit payment methods by conversion rate and failure reasons.
• Standardise payment event tracking across providers.
• Implement automated reconciliation (daily at minimum; intra-day if possible).

Days 31–60: Use the data operationally

• Build “payment truth” views for support (status, timestamps, refund path).
• Create rule-based automation for common cases (duplicate payments, delayed EFT proofs).
• Tighten refund SLAs and automate notifications.

Days 61–90: Add AI where it earns its keep

• Deploy AI customer service that can read payment events and answer accurately.
• Use predictive models to flag likely payment failure before checkout completes.
• Personalise payment method ordering based on user history and device context.

If your payment data is messy, start there. AI won’t rescue bad inputs.

What Liberia’s IIPS should prompt South African leaders to do next

Answer first: Treat payments as a growth system, not a cost centre—and you’ll get far more from AI.

Liberia’s IIPS is built to reduce cash dependence, connect mobile money, integrate banks, and modernise government payments. That’s infrastructure thinking. South African e-commerce leaders should adopt the same mindset inside their businesses: payments are not a checkbox at checkout; they’re the backbone of trust, retention, and automation.

This post sits in our series on how AI is powering e-commerce and digital services in South Africa, and the thread is consistent: AI performs best when the underlying digital rails are interoperable, observable, and fast.

If you’re planning your 2026 growth targets, here’s the question I’d put on the agenda: What would your business automate tomorrow if every payment state (success, failure, refund) was confirmed in seconds and cleanly recorded?