Last updated: 13 September 2026
LulamisaPay ("we", "us", "our") provides a WhatsApp and web platform for paying everyday bills — including prepaid electricity, traffic fines, airtime and data, and municipal accounts — in full, or through the Buy Now Pay Later account you already have.
To run your account and process payments, we collect:
If your ID number is already linked to another account. We don't link it to you straight away, because it may belong to someone else. Instead we ask for a photo of your ID and a selfie holding it. A member of our customer care team compares them by eye; no automated facial recognition is used. The photos are used only to check the ID number is yours, and are deleted as soon as a decision is made, whether it is approved or not. Until then, services looked up by ID number (municipal accounts and traffic fines) are unavailable, and everything else works as normal. If the ID is approved for you and another account had it, that account is asked to verify too.
Only if you choose to, we also collect the answers to optional household questions — see section 3.
Separately from paying your bills, you can choose to help build anonymous statistics about how South African households pay for essentials. This is a different purpose from processing your payments, so it needs its own consent, which you can give or withdraw at any time under My account & privacy on the WhatsApp main menu, or in your web account.
If you opt in, your transactions may be included in grouped statistics only — for example, "average electricity spend in a municipality in a week". These statistics may be shared with, or licensed to, government, municipalities or researchers. Any group with too few people in it is left out entirely, so no individual can be picked out.
You may also choose to answer a few optional household questions: your work situation, where your household's money comes from, household size, how many people depend on you, and a household income range. Every question includes "Prefer not to say". We don't ask your age or gender, because both can be worked out from your ID number.
Population group. One optional question asks which population group you identify with. This is special personal information under section 26 of POPIA, so we only ask it after you give separate, explicit consent. If you share it, it is stored encrypted, is only ever used in anonymous grouped statistics, and is never shown back in your web account.
What these answers are never used for. Nothing you answer affects your account, your payments, what you're offered or any decision about you. Your answers are kept apart from the systems that make those decisions.
Withdrawing. If you opt out of research or deactivate your account, your household answers are deleted.
Personal information such as names, ID numbers, phone numbers, ID verification photos and your population group, if you share it, is encrypted at rest. Access is restricted to the systems and people that need it, and every time an ID verification photo is opened is recorded.
We share the minimum necessary information with vetted third parties required to fulfil a transaction — for example payment processors and the Buy Now Pay Later provider you choose to pay with, Eskom/municipal systems for electricity tokens, and mobile network operators for airtime and data delivery. We do not sell your personal information. The only research output we share is anonymous and grouped, as described in section 3.
The account assistant on WhatsApp. If you use Ask about my account, your question is sent with a summary of your own account activity to Anthropic, our AI provider in the United States, to write the answer. Your personal details are not sent. We deliberately leave out your name, account number, ID number, phone number, email address and street address — the assistant isn't told them, which is why it can't greet you by name or read them back to you. What it receives is amounts, dates, what you paid for, your town and municipality, and yes/no facts such as whether you have an email on file. It never includes another customer's information, your PIN, or the meter numbers, prepaid tokens and other people's details attached to your payments.
We don't keep the conversation. The last few questions are held for a few minutes only, in memory and never written to our databases or backups, so you can ask a follow-up — then they're gone, immediately if you leave the chat. Because this provider is outside South Africa, this is a cross-border transfer; it happens only when you choose to use the assistant, and everything else in LulamisaPay works without it. The assistant can only read your own account — it cannot make, change or refund a payment, and anything it can't answer goes to our support team.
You have the right to request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal information, subject to any legal or contractual obligations we may have (such as transaction record-keeping requirements). To exercise these rights, contact us via the Contact page.
Before you can use LulamisaPay, you're asked to explicitly consent to this policy during onboarding on WhatsApp. You can withdraw consent at any time by contacting us, which may limit your ability to use the service.
We retain transaction and personal data only for as long as necessary to provide the service and meet legal, accounting, or regulatory record-keeping obligations. ID verification photos are the exception: they are deleted as soon as the verification is decided. We keep only the outcome, who decided and when.
We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be communicated to you via WhatsApp before they take effect.
Questions about this policy or your personal information? Reach out via the Contact page or email [email protected].