Reghardt Pretorius had some really cool ideas around what could be built if we all had SnapScan Merchant accounts and could accept credit card payments into our Investec Programmable Bank Accounts.
If we get enough people interested they might be keen to give us a special deal, or perhaps I could pull some strings at Investec / OfferZen.
Would anyone be keen in getting a SnapScan Merchant account to play around with?
hi, so the idea is to use snapscanās apis to allow the programmable bank account to make payments, with a human just allowing it to take place.
Using these two flows:
Awesome 
thanks so much for sharing Reghardt and welcome to the community discourse!
Iām definitely going to start looking into this when Iām back on Monday.
Christo Bezuidenhout actually used SnapScan in one of his demos, in a WhatsApp bill splitting implementation. You can watch it here https://youtu.be/tnpsjOFbkco?t=11m20s
Thanks for the systems diagrams!
hi, @adrianhopebailie sure thing!
So a few come to mind:
Nothing too groundbreaking, but having the ability to actually pull/push money programmatically would be pretty great. Doing it on the back of another transaction is pretty novel I think.
What do you think? On your side, any ideas?
Interesting. Can you explain what the flow/journey would be like for one of these?
i.e. When is the QR rendered, by whom etc?
(Iām struggling to understand where the money is flowing but I think Iām being dumb)
No worries,
So the QR is optional, we can also use a link of sorts, pushed via sms or email
So, A owes B money. Bās account creates a message to pull payment from A.
A receives message to make payment, makes payment. B hears about the transaction and clears the debt.
Something like that, not sure if it is making sense?
SnapScan can generate payment links for use on mobile. But the transaction must always be authorized by the mobile app.
E.g.
https://pos.snapscan.io/qr/DMSC0108
And you can add the amount and a reference with extra queries.
So this would have to be sent to the user for auth.
So lets say you need to put R100 into stokvel. You send an sms with the link and amount and reference embedded. You can check if the payment has been made using the reference and API. If the payment has been made you can confirm the deposit, if not then send a reminder. You can also use SnapScan params to make each payment reference only payable once and for the exact amount, in the URL
Not 100% yet. In this case who is using Snapscan (presumably B) and who is using the Investec programmable account (presumably A)?
So presumably B creates a payment link for A who pays it using their Investec card. This triggers a post-auth event in the programmable banking system.
What does A program this to do? Notify B? Surely B getās notified immediately anyway by Snapscan?
Is the key innovation here that the programmable banking API is triggered by incoming payments?
Iām still a bit lost as to what this enables?
Erm so afaik
A - who wants to accept payments
B - who wants to make payments
So A can program things to happen with card transactions and payments that appear in transaction history including request B to make a payment and confirm receipt of payments from B.
Sounds great to me. I tried getting a merchant account a while back but they wanted to see a website first which I didnāt have yet since I was developing it for the demo, so had to opt with Zapper instead. Might port that Grub Splitter to Telegram and Snapscan if I can get a merchant account. The āsnapcode with zero feesā also sounds great for the splitter.
Canāt believe SnapScan required you to have a website :-/
Are Zapperās dev docs publicly available?
Yes. These are the docs I used.
https://zapper.gitbook.io/integrations/
When signing up you need to select a store type. I selected Online. In the Legal Information you then need to provide a website, which I didnāt have yet. This is the email they sent me:
Hi there,
I hope this finds you well
We are currently screening all of our merchants for compliance with the new FICA and KYC (Know Your Customer) regulations, and weāve noticed that your account is missing some information.
Could you please give us an indication of the nature of your business / how you plan to use SnapScan? Iām struggling to find any relevant information online, but might be looking in the wrong places. Please send us a link to your website or Facebook page. If you donāt have a website, we might need some photographs of your goods/store set up.
If you are registered with the CIPC, please be sure to let us know!
Apologies for the extra admin! Hopefully we can get you up and running in no time
I then explained what the site will be and said Iāll to get a demo site up for them, after which they said they will wait for the demo website, but I then also applied to Zapper and they approved me so I left the Snapscan process.
Yeah I can see why some people might not get how this can be useful, having a snapscan merchant account myself, I can confirm it is really easy to already:
So @reggiepretās example of pulling money is already totally possible. I have even implemented snapscan using its APIās such that a ānotifyURLā can be used to notify any server of your choice of the successful payment. In theory opening up the doorway to automate other actions using that Server. We retrofitted the APIās to create a PayGate-like interaction on an ecommerce app. (I know we have. so many better solutions now, like PayFast, Flutterwave etc. trust me, this was a special case)
I do however think that adding a bill splitting app to this mix makes things super interesting because what we could do is use splitwise to automatically settle and request payments using the Investec banking APIās.
You could run a script almost like a cron job monthly, which automatically sends links to those who owe you money, and automatically settle with people who you owe money to.
What would be even more epic is using some kind of smart logic to query your transaction history, point out items that seem āirregularā and prompt you to check if you should split the amount (like R400 at a restaurant, you likely shared the meal ā unless you have really expensive taste)
I plan to tackle this at the next hackathon if my team agrees (unless we have an even cooler idea).
Thanks for the post @Ahren_Posthumus, this is really insightful into how Zapper can be leveraged into workflows.
So I tried to contact SnapScan but didnāt get much response.
I did however chat to the peeps at Zapper: Brett (CEO) and Keiran who heads up research and development. Theyāre unable to offer any zero-rated accounts as their pricing is stipulated by their T&Cās and fees are payable to Visa/MasterCard.
They are putting a large focus on developer APIs and tools though and building out a dev portal at the moment, and theyāre keen to work with the community to offer new features and so on.
One thing they did mention was that they can plug in any wallet and that would remove the fees involved. So that could work - and @reddragonlr has just built a wallet system on top of his Investec Account which could be leveraged for this purpose: https://www.offerzen.com/blog/programmable-banking-community-lishens-temporary-store-of-value
#allthethings!
