BLU bets on one prepaid voucher for everything

Blu Label Unlimited (BLU) is positioning its universal voucher business as the next major growth engine after electricity, betting that consumers will increasingly want a single digital voucher that can be used across everything from airtime and electricity to transport and gaming.

The strategy comes as consumers increasingly use prepaid platforms for a broader range of everyday needs — from electricity and airtime to gaming, transport and fibre — while BLU sees growing demand for a voucher that gives customers the flexibility to decide what they want to spend their money on later.

Universal voucher sales rose 22% in the year to May to R18.7bn, after growth of just over 40% in the past two financial years.

The company’s strategy is to move consumers away from buying individual vouchers for specific products towards a generic stored-value voucher that can be used across its ecosystem.

Brett Levy, co-CEO of BLU believes this could ultimately change the structure of the prepaid market. “We think the future is generic PINs (personal identification numbers), like what BLU is doing, and that you’ll see individual PINs fall away, and you will have a generic PIN across the board,” he said.

He believes the growth is pointing to a fundamental change in consumer behaviour.

The customer prefers the generic voucher, he said, because they would rather buy rand value and decide later what to do with it than commit immediately to electricity, airtime, bus tickets or gaming.

The opportunity for BLU is to turn that behaviour into a proprietary platform cutting across its entire prepaid ecosystem.

Instead of buying a R100 electricity voucher or R100 airtime voucher, consumers could eventually buy a R100 BLU voucher and use it for whichever product they need.

Levy believes the technology is now close to making that possible at scale. “We’re about six months to 12 months away from a generic voucher across the board of everything,” he said.

However, one of the main obstacles for the voucher business is that different products carry different discounts. A customer might receive one discount on electricity, another on airtime and another on transport, making it difficult to price a single voucher.

BLU’s technology will allow it to issue the voucher first and allocate the appropriate discount when the customer eventually uses it, Levy said.

In the year to May 2026, gross transaction value across PIN-less top-ups, prepaid electricity, ticketing and universal vouchers rose 7% to R99.9bn.

Commenting on trends, Levy said gaming continues to grow “exponentially”, while prepaid water consumption is beginning to increase, albeit from a small base. Smaller fibre providers are also gaining traction in townships and other underserved areas, with BLU seeing increased voucher sales from those operators.