Norman Nyawo Shares How Black Friday Presents Massive Growth Opportunity for Township SMEs

Norman Nyawo Shares How Black Friday Presents Massive Growth Opportunity for Township SMEs. Black Friday and the broader Black November trading period have become important indicators of how South African consumers spend and how small businesses adapt. For many SMEs, including those operating in townships and the informal economy, these trading peaks highlight shifts in payment behaviour, customer expectations, and the role of digital tools in daily operations. To understand these evolving patterns, we spoke with Norman Nyawo, Head of Merchant Solutions for Business and Commercial Banking at Standard Bank. His insights offer context on how payment systems are changing, what SMEs are experiencing on the ground, and how digitisation is shaping today’s trading environment. Read about it below.

What are some of the Black Friday opportunities for SMEs?

So Black Friday represents a great opportunity SMEs in the township as this is the biggest trading weekend that they have during the year. The township market represents a R900 billion opportunity and it’s important for SMEs in the township to be able to access this market during this time.

Online sales grew by over 30% in 2024. What are the biggest logistical or stock-related opportunities for SMEs?

So during Black Friday, SMEs can tap into a couple of different opportunities to ensure that they remain relevant and viable, to start off with, stock and inventory management is important, an SME having the capability to track their stock and inventory is quite important and being able to stock up during the Black Friday period will really assist the SME to be able to ensure that they have got the right amount of inventory and stock to trade. Secondly, it is important for SMEs to be able to accept multiple forms of payments, for instance they should be able to accept QR codes or any other digital wallets that will really open them up to a wide range of customers and cardholders that would want to visit their business.

Township SMEs often face liquidity challenges during high-volume trading periods. How is Standard Bank helping them improve liquidity management ahead of major retail events?

Standard Bank has taken a lot of time and effort to ensure that we can make our systems resilient and be able to manage the large volumes that will be coming over the Black Friday period. We’ve worked with all of our vendors and our partners, that ensure that we can deliver a viable and proper service to merchants and customers alike, to ensure that we will have 100% uptime.

You mentioned that mobile commerce now represents more than 67% of Black Friday transactions. What is driving this rapid consumer shift?

In the township economy I think what we have observed is that cash is still king and cash is till dominant, and what we are starting to see is that a lot of the customers that frequent these township economies are starting to bring digital forms of payments. So, it’s quite important for a merchant or a small business in the township to be able to accept these different forms of payments if they are to keep up with the trends that are coming along.

How does SimplyBLU practically help SMEs merge card and e-commerce payments into an effective omnichannel experience?

We have built a solution called SimplyBLU, which offers a very low-cost device offering, where a merchant can either buy or rent the solution. The solution also has a merchant app, which the customer or the merchant can download on their smartphone, and they can use this to efficiently accept card payments. The customer or the merchant also has the ability to go on our web portal where they can manage their store and in real time they can see insights about the business, and they can get real data about how well they are performing.

The informal economy is valued at roughly R900 billion annually. What key trends are you seeing in the adoption of prepaid cards, digital wallets, and other fintech tools among informal traders?

We are seeing an increase in ecommerce transactions and online payments as cardholders are preferring to shop online so it’s quite important for SMEs in the townships to start adopting these alternatives channels to get their products to consumers.

What are the biggest missed opprtunities for township SMEs?

The biggest missed opportunities for township merchants are not playing in the spaces that the cardholders are actually moving to. So, what we have seen is that most businesses are moving to online channels and cardholders and consumers are preferring to engage in other mediums.