Participants can now pay for a Laces entry by card. Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Verve and AfriGO sit beside MTN MoMo and Airtel Money at checkout, and the participant picks. There is nothing for you to switch on.
This guide compares card against mobile money broadly, but note that Airtel Money now shares card’s timing, not MTN’s — Airtel moved to the same payment partner as card since this guide was first published, so both now settle into the same Standard Wallet. Where this guide says “mobile money is instant”, read that as MTN specifically; see Taking payments and getting paid for the MTN/Airtel/card breakdown in full.
Two things about this are worth reading properly rather than skimming, because both of them are differences a participant or a treasurer will ask you about:
- Card costs the participant more than MTN mobile money does — UGX 1,500 + 5.8%, against UGX 500 + 2.9% on MTN and Airtel Money (Airtel payments retried to a third attempt use our backup network at UGX 500 + 5%).
- Card money takes a day or so to become withdrawable, and so does Airtel Money. MTN mobile money is still instant. That has not changed and it is not going to.
You receive the same amount either way.
What changes at checkout
The registration form is unchanged. At the payment step the participant now chooses between mobile money and card.
- Mobile money works exactly as it did. They type their number, a prompt arrives on the handset, they enter their Mobile Money PIN, and the entry is confirmed. Nothing leaves their account until they enter the PIN.
- Card opens the card form, with the bank’s own verification step where the card requires one, then returns to the same confirmation screen with the same order code.
Laces never sees a card number. The card is typed on our payment partner’s own hosted page, on their domain — the card number, expiry, CVV and PIN are never collected by, transmitted through, or readable by anything Laces operates. What comes back to us is the outcome of the charge, the amount, the provider’s references, and the last four digits, network and issuer for the receipt. That is the mechanism, and it is why accepting cards does not put card data anywhere near your event’s records. The full statement is clause 12.1 of the Merchant Service Agreement.
What card costs, and why
There are now three published rates, and which one applies depends on how the participant chose to pay:
| Paying by | Laces Service Fee | On a UGX 50,000 entry |
|---|---|---|
| MTN MoMo | UGX 500 + 2.9% | UGX 1,950, total UGX 51,950 |
| Airtel Money | UGX 500 + 2.9% | UGX 1,950, total UGX 51,950 |
| Card | UGX 1,500 + 5.8% | UGX 4,400, total UGX 54,400 |
Airtel Money is priced like MTN. If an Airtel payment is retried and reaches a third attempt, that attempt goes through our backup network at UGX 500 + 5% (a UGX 3,000 fee, total UGX 53,000, on a UGX 50,000 entry), and the participant confirms the new total first.
The same entry, side by side. Mobile money:
21KM Entry UGX 50,000
Laces Service Fee UGX 1,950
───────────
Total UGX 51,950Card:
21KM Entry UGX 50,000
Laces Service Fee UGX 4,400
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Total UGX 54,400You receive UGX 50,000 either way. The fee is added on top of the price you set and charged to the buyer. How they paid changes what they pay; it never changes what you are credited.
Why card is priced higher. Our card provider charges us roughly 4.8% on a card transaction, against roughly 3% on mobile money, and Laces absorbs that cost inside the one consolidated service fee rather than itemising a separate processing line to the participant. Charging the mobile-money rate on a card would mean collecting 2.9% while paying out 4.8% on every card order. UGX 1,500 + 5.8% is where card breaks even, not where it makes money.
That is also why both rates are stated side by side on /pricing and in the Organizer Terms instead of card being tucked behind a toggle. A participant paying by card pays more, and you should be able to see that without hunting for it.
Three things that did not change:
- Laces is still free for organizers. No signup fee, no subscription, no listing fee, on either rail.
- A free event is still free. A zero-priced distance carries no fee at all, not even the flat portion, whichever way it would have been paid.
- There is no extra charge for having taken a card payment. The participant’s fee is the whole of it.
One caveat if your organisation is on a negotiated rate: a negotiated rate covers mobile money only. Card orders are charged the published card rate. That is in the Organizer Terms too, and it follows from the same arithmetic — we cannot honour a rate below what the card networks charge us.
When the money is yours
This is the part to get straight, because the answer is genuinely different for the different rails and it would be easy to assume the card delay applies to everything. It does not — but as of Airtel’s move to the same payment partner as card, it is not only card either.
| Paid by | When it is withdrawable |
|---|---|
| MTN MoMo | Immediately on confirmation, any day of the week — your Instant Wallet |
| Airtel Money | Once it settles into your Standard Wallet, usually within about a day and a half |
| Card | Once it settles into your Standard Wallet, usually within about a day and a half |
MTN mobile money is still instant, and this work did not cost that. Our payment partner settles an MTN collection in realtime, so the moment the charge is confirmed, that money is in your Instant Wallet and you can withdraw it. No 24-hour wait, no settlement batch, no waiting for event day, and no weekend gap. Selling entries on a Saturday morning and withdrawing on Saturday afternoon still works exactly as it did before cards existed.
Airtel Money and card are different, and the difference is not ours to remove. Both are collected through the same payment partner and both settle into your Standard Wallet rather than being credited the instant the charge succeeds — each lands there once our payment partner’s own settlement process confirms it, usually within about a day and a half. We state that as what is ordinarily observed rather than as a guarantee, because the timing belongs to the payment partner, not to Laces. Once settled, withdrawing that money to mobile money is instant, same as the Instant Wallet — only a bank withdrawal from the Standard Wallet keeps the longer timing (see “Getting it out to a bank” below).
This is not a Laces hold and Laces earns nothing from it. We cannot pay out money we have not been paid. It is also exactly why your Total Earnings now shows the Instant Wallet and Standard Wallet separately, rather than as one figure you would have to interpret: what is available, what is card money still clearing, and anything still being confirmed. Card money is never added to the Standard Wallet’s available balance before it settles, so a balance you can act on is never overstated.
A card entry then reaches the Standard Wallet a little later and behaves identically to Airtel Money. There is no separate card balance to withdraw differently. If you sell no card entries, nothing about your settlement changes at all.
Getting it out to a bank
Withdrawal fees are unchanged — they are the payment provider’s schedule and card and Airtel Money do not touch it. Your first withdrawal is still free, once per organisation, across your whole balance.
What is worth knowing is the timing on the far side: money that came in by card or Airtel Money — your Standard Wallet — can take three to five business days to reach a bank account, and does not settle on weekends. That is the receiving institution’s and the payment networks’, not ours. Withdrawing that same money to mobile money instead, rather than to a bank, is instant once it has settled — the delay is specific to the bank rail, not to the money’s origin in general.
We claim availability, not arrival. Once a payment is in your available balance you may withdraw it; how long the transfer then takes to land in your bank or mobile-money account is the receiving institution’s, and we do not undertake a date for it. Mobile-money withdrawals still run every day of the week, weekends included, from either wallet.
In the Admin App: tap Withdraw on Total Earnings and choose the Standard Wallet, or tap Withdraw on the Standard Wallet directly to go straight to it. A bank withdrawal from it shows the three-to-five-business-day notice, weekends excluded, before you confirm.
Refunds on a card entry
Refunds work the same way and are issued from the Admin App, in full or in part. Two differences worth setting expectations around:
- A card refund goes back to the card that was charged, and cannot be redirected to a different card or to a mobile-money number.
- It takes longer to arrive than a mobile-money refund does. We submit both immediately; the card refund then travels back through the card networks and the buyer’s own bank. The Refund Policy states the ranges we actually observe.
As before, a refund returns the entry price you set, and the Laces Service Fee is not reversed — it paid to move the money and that cost was incurred when the payment was processed. You are not asked to fund it and you are not charged again to issue the refund.
What you should do
Honestly, nothing. Card is live for every event that is selling entries and there is no setting to find.
Two things are worth doing anyway:
- Tell whoever answers your questions. “Why is my total UGX 54,400 when the entry is UGX 50,000?” is going to be asked, and the answer is that they chose card, which costs more to process than mobile money. If they would rather pay the lower fee, mobile money is right there at checkout.
- Read section 4 of Taking payments and getting paid if you are planning cashflow around entry revenue. Mobile money being instant makes cancellation risk more significant, not less, and that is unchanged.
The terms behind it
The binding versions of everything above, updated for card:
- Organizer Terms, the fee table, settlement timing and refund exposure
- Merchant Service Agreement, card acceptance, the hosted payment page and PCI DSS posture
- Refund Policy, how a card refund is processed and how long it takes
- Privacy Policy, what our payment partners receive and what comes back to us
- Terms of Service, the agreement covering organizers and participants
Questions about a specific payment go to payments@laces.run, with the order code.
Related: Taking payments and getting paid · How Laces works, end to end · Pricing
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