PayJustNow Owner Faces Bad Debt Risk and DebiCheck Payment Friction

South Africa · FINANCE

PayJustNow bad debts are emerging as a key pressure point for the South African buy now, pay later platform, whose rapid growth now collides with a tougher collections environment shaped by DebiCheck authentication rules and stretched consumer finances.

Who owns PayJustNow and how fast it has grown

PayJustNow was acquired in 2022 by Weaver Fintech, the Mauritian financial-services subsidiary of HomeChoice International, which took an 85 percent stake in the business. The company has scaled quickly since then, reaching 2.5 million users by March 2025 and adding 100,000 customers a month, according to Disrupt Africa.

Craig Newborn is identified as a PayJustNow co-founder, while Greg van der Riet is listed publicly as co-founder and Chief Operating Officer or Chief Commercial Officer. Dean Hyde appears in company documentation as an executive and owner contact.

That expansion has made PayJustNow one of the more visible buy now, pay later operators in South Africa. But the model depends on collecting many small consumer repayments reliably, which leaves it exposed when customers fall behind or when collection rails become less forgiving.

The default picture and where PayJustNow bad debts pressure comes from

PayJustNow has defended its underwriting publicly, telling ITWeb that it maintained a default rate below 2 percent of gross merchandise value since inception, even under cost-of-living pressure. Another industry piece similarly reported the company at just under 2 percent in defaults.

The commercial risk is not that PayJustNow is publicly known to be in distress, but that its model is exposed to credit-loss pressure in a weak consumer environment. Buy now, pay later providers can grow quickly when approvals are easy, yet they carry repayment risk among consumers with thin or volatile cash flows.

In South Africa, that risk is heightened by a payment landscape where cash remains important, digital adoption is constrained by fees and infrastructure, and many consumers still experience payment frictions in low-income and township markets. The World Bank describes the country’s financial-consumer landscape as complex and fragmented, with overlapping ombud structures and inconsistent access across products.

What DebiCheck was meant to fix and why it creates friction

DebiCheck was rolled out in phases from late 2017, and the older authenticated and non-authenticated early debit order systems were discontinued on 1 November 2021. The South African Reserve Bank says DebiCheck was designed to verify consumer debit mandates up front and reduce abuse.

The system helps businesses by making fraudulent or unauthorized debit-order reversals harder, because the mandate is authenticated by the consumer’s bank. But it hurts some merchants by adding friction at onboarding, increasing the chance that a customer never completes mandate approval.

Industry and bank sources say DebiCheck can create more administration, slower onboarding, and lower collection success because customers must approve the mandate before collection starts. ITWeb also notes that the initial DebiCheck roll-out suffered from inconsistent rule interpretation across banks and systems operators.

Why the collections game has changed for South African lenders

DebiCheck changes the collections game in two opposite ways. It reduces unauthorized debit-order abuse, but it does not solve problems caused by customers simply not having money in the account on debit day.

That trade-off is especially relevant to buy now, pay later and consumer-lending firms, whose profitability depends on getting large numbers of small-ticket repayments through efficiently. When authentication adds steps, conversion can drop and arrears or write-offs can rise even if fraud falls.

The South African Reserve Bank’s digital-payments roadmap highlights obstacles including interoperability gaps, legacy systems, financial exclusion, and digital-literacy constraints. Treasury and other policy documents similarly stress that cash remains widely used and that inclusion efforts must fit low-income users and non-bank participants better.

The wider struggle over payment rails and consumer data

The geopolitics here is less about sanctions or direct state rivalry and more about who controls payment infrastructure, credit rails, and data. The International Monetary Fund notes that digital payments in sub-Saharan Africa create efficiency gains but also competition, governance, privacy, cybersecurity, and money-laundering concerns.

That matters because payments infrastructure is becoming strategic: whoever controls rails, identity, settlement data, and consumer credit origination can shape market access and consumer behavior. For South Africa, this sits inside a broader contest between domestic incumbents protecting established banking infrastructure, fintechs seeking lower-friction growth, and regulators trying to expand inclusion while reducing systemic risk.

This private-sector infrastructure struggle inside a major African economy has external relevance because South Africa is a regional payments hub and a test case for how emerging markets manage digital credit and mandate authentication. The outcome will shape how other African markets approach the same tension between growth and collections discipline, a theme explored in Africa: The New Scramble.

What to watch next for PayJustNow and South African BNPL

The key indicator to watch is whether PayJustNow can keep its default rate below 2 percent of gross merchandise value while still adding customers at the pace reported in March 2025. Any upward drift in arrears would signal that the collections environment is biting harder than the company’s public statements suggest.

Regulatory attention is also likely to intensify. The South African Reserve Bank has already warned about buy now, pay later risks, and PayJustNow was among the firms that defended the model after that warning, according to ITWeb.

For investors and merchants, the PayJustNow story is a live test of whether South African buy now, pay later can sustain rapid growth without a painful rise in bad debts. The answer will depend on how well the company manages the friction DebiCheck has introduced into the very collections process its business model relies on.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

• itweb.co.za
• documents1.worldbank.org
• reddit.com
• paym8.co.za

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