By Shruti Menon Seeboo
There is a particular kind of frustration familiar to anyone who has ever abandoned an online purchase halfway through checkout: the search for a wallet, the squinting at sixteen digits on a card, the hunt for a one-time password buried somewhere in a text message. It is, by some distance, the single biggest reason e-commerce businesses lose customers they have already paid good money to attract. Last week, at Peach Payments’ Mauritius office, a room full of merchants and partners gathered to hear how that friction is about to disappear — courtesy of Apple Pay, now officially live on the island.
The session was led by Uways Kureeman, Country Director of Peach Payments Mauritius, who opened by setting the context for why the room had been assembled in stages rather than all at once. “We’ve been getting lots of questions, lots of queries from new partners and merchants and potential merchants around what they need to do, how they did work,” he explained, “or how would they get that website live.” Rather than field the same questions repeatedly, Peach decided to bring its partners in for a structured walkthrough — starting, fittingly, with one of its most important collaborators in the room, MCB. “Without a bank that would allow people to actually get their code on Apple Pay, this milestone would not be possible,” Uways said. “So, well done to MCB.”
The scale of the achievement is worth dwelling on. Mauritius has become only the fourth country in Africa to go live with Apple Pay, following South Africa, Egypt, and Morocco — and notably ahead of considerably larger markets. “Mauritius is only the fourth country in Africa to have Apple Pay live,” Uways told the room. “It’s an honour for Mauritius to actually be the fourth one among all African countries to achieve this status.” He pointed to the island’s unusually high concentration of Apple device owners — iPhones, MacBooks, Apple Watches — as part of the reason the timing makes sense. “We have that premium demographic using any Apple device that can potentially be an Apple Pay user.”
For merchants in the room weighing up whether the technology was worth the conversation, Uways came armed with data drawn from Peach’s own experience. The company introduced Apple Pay in South Africa back in 2021, giving it years of transaction data to draw on. The headline figures were striking: where traditional alternative payment methods without additional security layers convert at around 87.3 per cent, and standard card payments with 3D Secure authentication and one-time passwords convert at roughly 75 per cent, Apple Pay transactions convert at approximately 90 per cent. “If you’re running an e-commerce website, or if you’ve been working with clients who has e-commerce website, you know conversion rate is key,” Uways said. “If you can’t convert them, that’s a huge loss.”
The reasoning behind that uplift, he explained, comes down to friction — or rather, the dramatic reduction of it. A typical card payment requires a customer to locate their card, type out its number, expiry date, sometimes a CVV and billing address, and then retrieve a one-time password from an app or text message they may not immediately know how to find. “Many people, buyers, clients, they don’t understand this and don’t know where to get this,” Kureeman observed. Apple Pay collapses that entire sequence into one or two steps, authenticated through Face ID, Touch ID, or a device passcode. “It’s basically one to two steps without having to get your wallet out, without having to check your email for an OTP.”
Security, Uways stressed, is not sacrificed for that convenience — if anything, the opposite is true. Cards added to Apple Pay are tokenised, meaning the actual card number is never stored on the device itself. “What is actually being saved is a unique device card number, which is being saved on a secure element chip on your phone,” he explained. “It’s not your card number being saved on your phone, and tomorrow, I don’t know for X reason, your phone gets hacked… it’s not that.” The practical upshot, he noted, is that the risk of losing a physical card and having to go through the hassle of cancellation and reissuance “is near zero.”
The session included two live demonstrations — one showing a mobile checkout completed via Apple Pay in roughly twenty seconds without a physical card in sight, and a second showing the equivalent flow on a desktop screen, completed by scanning a QR code with a phone. Uways also addressed the contactless point-of-sale experience increasingly familiar to anyone shopping in person. “Any MCB device in any shop, you can tap and pay with your Apple Pay setup on your phone or your watch,” he said, adding a wry aside about the convenience: “But you’re spending more money. That’s a way of making you spending more money. Be careful around that!”
Beyond the consumer-facing experience, Uways walked merchants through the infrastructure sitting behind it — webhooks that confirm transaction status even if a customer closes their browser mid-payment, dashboard filtering by card network or payment method, and dedicated account management support. For merchants and partners alike, he stressed, the activation process requires essentially no technical lift. “No extra fees. No extra payment in terms of setup,” he said. “So it’s seamless for you.”
If Uways’ portion of the session was about mechanics and momentum, Sanoubar Ghani’s was about texture — what Apple Pay actually means for the hospitality, food and beverage, and entertainment merchants she works with daily. Sanoubar is Peach Payments’ Enterprise Sales Manager for the hospitality sector, and she introduced herself with evident warmth as “the fun side of Peach Payments.”
Having spent four years embedded in the sector, she described her own habits as a consumer in deeply personal terms. “Whenever I see a queue, I’m like, yes, I’m doing the payment right now,” she told the room, drawing a direct line between her own habits as a consumer and what her merchants stand to gain. “When they say, okay, fine, I can do my payment, I’m not very happy — payment is done, customer service to the top and everything.”
For Sanoubar Ghani, the appeal of Apple Pay in hospitality is inseparable from Mauritius’s position as a tourist destination. “Apple Pay is the most preferred payment method, especially from our [visitors] coming to Mauritius,” she said, and the demand has been building locally for years. “It’s been five years now, [Peach] in Mauritius, and we’ve been having this question: when are you going to have Apple Pay? When are you going to have Apple Pay? So now that we have Apple Pay, it has been such a game changer.” Crucially, she noted, the benefit isn’t limited to international visitors. “It’s not only for tourists that can pay by Apple Pay, but Mauritians as well. It’s something very new to them, but it’s something they were looking for.”
In hospitality specifically, Sanoubar argued, payment experience is inseparable from brand reputation. “Whenever a client is happy… they’re going to tell their friend, listen, I went to this company and I recommend you going back — facility of payment, great service,” she said. “This is something that’s very important when you are a merchant dealing with clients.” Asked separately whether the Apple Pay integration had shortened her sales cycle, she was candid that the complexity of hospitality deals — involving multiple systems and layers of stakeholder communication — meant the timeline itself hadn’t changed dramatically. What had changed, she said, was the quality of the conversation. “It’s making the sales much more interesting, right? Because now we have the most preferred payment method of the hotel’s customer base… it has made the conversation a bit easier to flow, because we are talking from the same perspective: that you want to give a seamless payment checkout experience to your clients.”
The technical and risk-focused portion of the session fell to David Anthony, Peach Payments’ Sales Head for Enterprise, Global Market, whose remarks addressed the kind of granular detail that merchants — and their finance teams — tend to ask about once the initial excitement settles. He fielded questions on transaction descriptors, the codes that determine how a charge appears on a customer’s bank statement, and how these are linked to merchant category codes assigned during onboarding.
He also addressed, directly and without hedging, the question of cost. “There’s no extra cost for enabling [Apple Pay] on your dashboard,” he confirmed. “Apple Pay is a payment method, but behind it is your card that is tokenised on the wallet, so it’s basically a card transaction that is being processed. So for merchant, it’s the same card transaction fee.” For end customers, the fee structure is invisible entirely: “The client will not have any fee.”
Fraud and security, unsurprisingly, dominated much of the technical discussion. One merchant in the room raised a pointed concern about the growing sophistication of scams and the risk of insider threats — an employee with platform access generating fraudulent payment links, for instance. David’s response was layered. Peach undergoes annual penetration testing, he explained, and can provide merchants with reports detailing what mitigation measures have been taken. A colleague reinforced the point from the platform’s infrastructure side, noting that Peach operates within a PCI DSS-compliant environment audited yearly not only for that certification but separately by Visa, Mastercard, and Amex. “The environment itself is safe and secured,” he said, while also pointing merchants toward practical safeguards within their own control, such as enabling two-factor authentication for staff with dashboard access and relying on Peach’s second-by-second transaction logging to trace any suspicious activity. “If someone is using the link sending that for anyone to pay, the money will be in your bank account,” he acknowledged of the insider-threat scenario, “but the trail that they would leave would be huge.”
On the specific question of Apple Pay’s relationship to physical card fraud, the team was clear that tokenisation closes off an entire category of risk that exists with a physical card sitting in someone’s pocket. “With a card, your card is in your pocket… and someone just stuck with us with a device that can capture,” one of the technical team explained, contrasting this with Apple Pay’s requirement that a transaction be authenticated biometrically or via passcode. “It eliminates this issue.” The lighter-hearted caveat that followed drew some laughs in the room: parents, the team warned, should be cautious about saving their own card details on a child’s phone, since the convenience cuts both ways once a device is unlocked.
In a separate, one-on-one conversation following the session, Uways expanded on how quickly he expects Mauritian merchants to see results. Asked how soon e-commerce businesses using the Peach gateway might notice a conversion lift on their dashboards, his answer reflected confidence built on watching consumer behaviour shift well before the launch. “I see the Mauritian ecosystem adopting the Apple Pay solution quite fast,” he said. “If you work in any shop today, you will see people from multiple generations using it already… so this will be an instant win for them.” He was equally direct about the activation experience for merchants already using Peach’s standard integrations. “It’s seamless for you, it’s already built, so no need to do any extra implementation or coding,” he said. “It’s just a question of saying, yes, I want Apple Pay.”
Asked to walk through the security architecture in more detail, Uways returned to the layered nature of Apple Pay’s protections — beginning with the verification required simply to add a card to a digital wallet in the first place. “If the card is not yours, it’s very difficult to add it on your Apple Pay,” he said. “That’s the first step.” From there, tokenisation and the PCI DSS-compliant card infrastructure provide further layers. “It’s multiple security layered and secured on the physical chip of your phone.”
For Sanoubar, the most revealing measure of Apple Pay’s reception wasn’t a statistic but a sentiment she has heard echoed across the hospitality sector for half a decade. Asked how much of a commercial advantage it is to have a globally recognised brand like Apple Pay built natively into Peach’s toolkit, she didn’t hesitate. “It’s such a game changer,” she said. “It’s not something that is new to the Mauritian market, but it’s not something new to the people… it’s been on the market all over the world for so many years,” and the local appetite, in her experience, had simply been waiting for the infrastructure to catch up.
David, reflecting separately on the room’s overall reaction to the session, offered perhaps the most telling read on where Mauritius’s merchant ecosystem currently stands. “It is something that they already kind of thinking about, and it is a well adopted solution for our network,” he said, attributing much of that readiness to Mauritius’s increasingly international customer base and its own ambitions toward becoming a more digitally fluent economy. “We are more aware of the technology of the payment facilities, and we are [moving] to a digital Mauritius. Our audience today is well aware of this, and they are willing to change, to accept the change, and to move with the change.” Pressed on how many of the merchants present had already integrated Apple Pay or expressed interest in doing so, his estimate suggested the session had done its job: “There are a few that approached me also to integrate,” he said, putting the figure in the region of ten to fifteen businesses ready to move.
On the question of frictionless checkout design across devices — a detail that matters enormously to e-commerce merchants juggling mobile, tablet, and desktop traffic — David underscored that simplicity for the customer is the entire point of the exercise. “We’re not trying to make more hassle, we’re trying to make things easier,” he said, describing how desktop users simply scan a QR code rather than navigating a more cumbersome cross-device handoff. The commercial logic, in his telling, follows naturally from consumer psychology. “When they need to go and have their card details, their mind changes,” he said of the moment hesitation creeps in during a typical checkout. “What we’ve seen is an increase in sales and increase in conversion ratio.”
Pricing sensitivity, David acknowledged, remains the first instinct of any merchant encountering a new payment feature — a reasonable scepticism in an environment where costs are perpetually rising. Peach’s answer, he said, was to remove that calculation from the equation entirely by keeping pricing unchanged. “We keep the pricing as it is for their normal card transactions, with no additional fees,” he said. “In return, they are benefiting from this big chunk of Apple users.” Beyond the technical rollout, he described an ambition for Peach to function as something closer to a connective hub for its merchant community: “We’re trying to do… a kind of networking solution where we connect our merchants together and they can exchange their ideas, they can exchange their businesses.”
Taken together, the session offered Mauritius’s merchants something more useful than a product announcement: a clear-eyed account, from three different vantage points, of why a payment method that has quietly become unremarkable in much of the world is arriving on the island at a moment when both consumer behaviour and merchant readiness appear genuinely aligned. As Uways put it when asked, almost in passing, whether Google Pay or Samsung Pay might follow: “It’s not up to us.” For now, at least, Apple has made its choice — and Mauritius’s merchants are being asked to make theirs.
