Mobile Wallet Payments: The AI Commerce Flywheel

Rwanda sits at roughly 86% mobile money usage among adults. Zambia recorded a 44% jump to about 1.4 billion mobile money transactions (mid‑2024 vs mid‑2023). Those aren’t just “payments stats”. They’re a signal that a big part of Africa’s digital economy runs on wallet-led behaviour—people pay the way they text.

That’s why the recent move by Xsolla (a global games commerce company) to add SPENN as a payment method in Rwanda and Zambia matters well beyond gaming. Payment rails like this are the plumbing for everything we talk about in our series “How AI Is Powering E-commerce and Digital Services in South Africa.” If the checkout is clunky, AI can’t save you. If the checkout is trusted and familiar, AI can finally do its job: personalise, automate, and scale growth.

Here’s the stance I’ll defend in this post: AI-powered e-commerce in South Africa will only scale as fast as its payment experiences feel local, low-friction, and reliable. The SPENN/Xsolla news is a useful case study—because it shows what “local and reliable” looks like in mobile-first markets, and what South African retailers and digital service teams should copy.

Why this integration is bigger than gaming

Answer first: Xsolla integrating SPENN is really about conversion—turning interest into paid transactions in markets where wallets are the default.

Yes, the headline is “game developers can sell more easily.” But zoom out: games are a stress test for digital commerce. They have high-frequency purchases, impatient users, and a brutal truth: if the payment fails, the customer doesn’t “call you tomorrow”—they bounce.

That’s what makes this integration interesting for the broader African e-commerce conversation:

• Mobile-first economies punish friction. Every extra step in checkout is a drop in conversion.
• Wallet-led payments normalise digital spending. When people already trust mobile money for daily life, they’re more willing to buy digital goods.
• A strong consumer–merchant ecosystem compounds. More merchants accepting a wallet increases consumer utility; more consumers increase merchant incentive.

For South African businesses selling subscriptions, on-demand services, digital content, or even cross-border products, the lesson is simple: payments aren’t a back-office function. They’re a growth function.

Mobile money is the foundation for AI-powered e-commerce

Answer first: AI improves e-commerce outcomes (conversion, retention, fraud control) only when the payment layer produces clean signals and predictable completion.

Teams often start their “AI in e-commerce” journey with ad creative generation, chatbots, or product recommendations. Those are useful—but they’re downstream. The upstream driver is whether a customer can pay without drama.

The “AI commerce flywheel” starts at checkout

Here’s the flywheel I’ve seen play out in practice:

1. More successful payments → more completed orders
2. More completed orders → better first-party data (real purchases, not just clicks)
3. Better data → better AI personalisation and targeting
4. Better personalisation → higher conversion and retention
5. Higher conversion → more revenue to reinvest in customer experience

If you’re a South African retailer using AI-driven marketing automation, this is your uncomfortable truth: your models are only as good as the behavioural data your checkout produces. A wallet-led market with fewer declines generates cleaner “truth data”.

What SPENN + Xsolla gets right (and why it matters)

Xsolla highlights three benefits: streamlined checkout, fewer declines, and access to a growing wallet network. For AI-powered e-commerce, those map neatly to:

• Streamlined checkout = higher conversion rate (better training signals for what messaging and offers work)
• Fewer declines = fewer false negatives (AI can distinguish “customer didn’t want it” from “payment failed”)
• Wallet network growth = scalable addressable market (AI can segment and personalise at meaningful volume)

Put bluntly: failed transactions poison analytics. If 15% of your “abandoned carts” are actually payment failures, your AI will optimise the wrong things.

What South African e-commerce teams should copy from wallet-led markets

Answer first: Treat local payment methods as part of your customer experience design, then use AI to optimise the journey around them.

South Africa is more card-heavy than some neighbouring markets, but mobile wallets, bank apps, and instant payments have become mainstream—especially for prepaid users and younger buyers. The Rwanda/Zambia pattern still applies: customers choose what feels familiar and controllable.

1) Design checkout for trust, not just speed

Speed matters, but trust converts. Wallet-led payments win because customers feel they can see, approve, and reverse (or at least dispute) transactions more confidently.

What this looks like for a South African online store or digital service:

• Offer payment options that match customer reality (wallets, instant EFT/instant payments, cards)
• Use AI-driven UX testing to learn which payment order and messaging converts best
• Reduce cognitive load: fewer form fields, fewer redirects, clearer confirmation

A practical approach: run an AI-assisted checkout experiment over two weeks:

• Variant A: card-first checkout
• Variant B: wallet/instant-pay-first checkout
• Measure: payment success rate, time-to-pay, refunds, support tickets

You’re not guessing; you’re letting behaviour decide.

2) Use AI to recover failed payments (without annoying people)

Payment declines aren’t only a bank issue. They’re often caused by:

• insufficient funds at that moment
• intermittent connectivity
• authentication friction
• merchant risk rules

AI can help, but only if your workflow is mature. A solid “recovery” system includes:

• Smart retry logic: reattempt at a better time window (based on user patterns)
• Alternative payment nudges: suggest a wallet or instant-pay option after a failed card attempt
• Support automation: trigger a concise help message with the exact failure category

The goal isn’t to harass customers. It’s to give them a clean second chance.

3) Personalise offers based on payment behaviour (not demographics)

Here’s what works: segment by payment behaviour because it predicts purchase completion better than age or location.

Examples of AI-driven segments:

• “Wallet loyalists” (use wallets 80%+ of the time) → offer wallet-exclusive bundles or loyalty points
• “Authentication drop-offs” (fail at OTP/3DS step) → simplify flow, offer instant-pay alternative
• “Low-balance pattern” (buys right after payday) → schedule promotions to payday windows

This is where AI becomes practical: you’re aligning promotions with how people actually pay.

AI + payments in Africa: the real opportunities (and risks)

Answer first: The opportunity is higher conversion and smarter fraud control; the risk is over-automation that blocks legitimate customers.

Wallet ecosystems grow fast because they lower barriers to digital trade. But growth attracts fraud. The smart move is not “more rules.” It’s better decisions.

Smarter fraud prevention without killing conversion

AI can reduce fraud and protect revenue when it’s used to score risk and route users, not to blanket-block.

A practical fraud playbook for South African e-commerce and digital services:

• Risk scoring: assign each transaction a probability of fraud
• Step-up authentication: only high-risk payments get extra verification
• Behavioural signals: device fingerprint, velocity checks, location consistency
• Human review for edge cases: AI flags, humans decide on ambiguous orders

The metric to watch isn’t “fraud down.” It’s fraud-to-sales ratio and false decline rate. If you’re declining good customers, you’re funding your competitor.

Cross-border digital services are next

The SPENN/Xsolla story also points to a bigger African pattern: digital goods cross borders faster than physical goods.

South African businesses selling:

• subscriptions (fitness, learning, streaming)
• SaaS tools
• digital content
• online events

…can grow regionally if they treat payments as a localisation layer. AI helps with language, pricing, support, and personalisation—but payment acceptance is the “door.” If the door doesn’t open, nothing else matters.

“People also ask” (the questions buyers ask internally)

Answer first: These are the practical questions that decide whether AI commerce projects succeed or stall.

Should we prioritise AI personalisation or payment optimisation?

Payment optimisation first. A 3–5% lift from recommendations is nice, but a 10–20% reduction in failed payments often delivers faster revenue impact and cleaner data for every AI model downstream.

How do we measure whether a new wallet option is worth it?

Track:

• payment success rate
• checkout completion rate
• refund/chargeback rate
• customer support contacts per 1,000 orders
• repeat purchase rate by payment type

Then compare net revenue retained, not just gross sales.

Will wallet payments reduce cart abandonment in South Africa?

Often, yes—especially for mobile shoppers and prepaid users. The key is to position wallet/instant-pay options prominently and keep the flow short.

What to do next (if you sell online in South Africa)

The SPENN integration story is a reminder that Africa’s digital economy is being built from the payment layer up. Rwanda and Zambia show what happens when mobile money becomes the default: digital transactions scale quickly, and businesses have the raw material (data + trust) to build smarter experiences.

If you’re working on AI-powered e-commerce or digital services in South Africa, here’s a practical next step I recommend: audit your payment funnel like it’s a product. List every failure point (technical, UX, trust, fraud rules), quantify the revenue impact, and prioritise fixes before you invest in “fancier” AI.

AI will keep getting cheaper and easier to deploy. Trustworthy, local payment experiences are harder to copy—and they decide who wins. When you look at your own checkout, what’s the one friction point you’ve been tolerating that’s quietly costing you sales?