About rano
Payments with nothing hidden in the fee.
Most South African businesses pay around 3% to get paid online and see one number on their statement. We think they should see every part of it, and keep more of it.
Why we started
A fee you can’t see is a fee you can’t fight.
When a customer pays by card, the money passes through several hands: the customer’s bank, Visa or Mastercard, the acquiring bank and the gateway. Each takes a share. Most gateways roll all of that into one rate and keep the difference.
Paying by bank is cheaper still. A PayShap or EFT payment costs the banks a few rand to move, whether it’s R50 or R50,000. Yet it’s often priced as a percentage, as if it were a card.
rano passes those costs through at cost and adds one small, published share for us. Every payment shows the split, so you can check our work.
What we believe
Four rules we build by.
Show every cent
Each payment lists what the customer’s bank, the card network, the acquirer and we took. If we can’t explain a fee on the receipt, we shouldn’t charge it.
Our own gateway, not a wrapper
We’re building the payments engine, ledger and bank connections ourselves, rather than reselling someone else’s rails at a markup. That’s what lets us price at cost plus a small, fixed share.
Bank payments first
PayShap and EFT cost a few rand to move, whatever the amount. We want paying by bank to be as easy as tapping a card, and priced like it.
Built for South Africa
Rand-first pricing, local banks, local hosting and POPIA from day one. Not a global product with South Africa added on later.
How we’re building it
Built to hold money. Not just to pass it along.
More detail on our security page.
A double-entry ledger
Every cent that moves is recorded twice, as a balanced pair of entries that are never edited or deleted, and reconciled against the bank's records every day.
No guessing when a bank goes quiet
If a bank or card network times out, the payment is marked as processing and we check what happened. We never blindly retry, which is how double charges happen.
Card numbers kept out of our systems
Card details go straight into a certified vault provider. Our servers only ever handle tokens.
Data hosted in South Africa
Live payment and merchant data will be stored in South African data centres, which keeps POPIA simple and suits our banking partners.
Test mode as a full copy
The sandbox runs the same code against simulated banks, so what works in test works in live.
Where we are
Early access, and honest about it. We don’t process live payments yet.
- Now
Building the gateway
The payments engine, ledger and API, running against simulated banks.
- Next
Signing a partner bank
A South African sponsor bank and card acquirer, and registration as a third-party payment provider.
- Then
Test mode opens
Early-access merchants and developers get sandbox keys and build their integrations.
- Launch
Live with a pilot group
A small group of merchants takes real payments first, reconciled daily, before we open more widely.
Be one of our first merchants.
We’re onboarding a small group of South African businesses first. Leave your email and we’ll be in touch.