The first leg of the digital payments race involved onboarding micro merchants through QR codes. Now, we’re well into the second leg—ensuring these merchants continue to transact regularly.

This, ultimately, is what will determine whether all the time, capital, and human resources spent onboarding merchants actually bears fruit. It even opens up new avenues for monetisation, like lending and cross-selling other financial products.

How to keep merchants from falling back into their old cash-first habits, though, is more complicated than getting them to put up a QR code sticker.