South Africa’s central bank plans to publish a framework by late November that would give regulated nonbank firms a route into the national payment system, a change it says could increase competition and lower costs while imposing new oversight duties.
South African Reserve Bank (SARB) Governor Lesetja Kganyago set out the timetable in an Oct. 20 address at a payments conference in Pretoria. The proposal would allow eligible nonbanks to carry out specified payment activities. SARB released drafts of the framework and an exemption notice for public comment in May.
Kganyago said payment-system access has generally been channeled through banks. He said payment firms do not engage in maturity transformation, and cited recurring banking crises around the world as a reason for rigorous bank regulation. Proposed requirements for nonbanks include governance, safeguards for customer funds, operational resilience and reporting.
PayShap, a real-time payment service launched in 2023, had processed one billion transactions and moved more than R1 trillion by the time of the address. In 2025, it processed about 6% as many transactions as card payments and fewer than 40% as many as electronic funds transfer credit transactions.
SARB aims to begin addressing obstacles to PayShap’s use by the end of March 2027. The issues it identified include low public awareness, limited merchant acceptance, price differences among banks and variation in banks’ features, transaction limits and customer experience. “A national instant-payment service cannot feel like a different product depending on where a customer banks,” Kganyago said.
The bank is targeting a QR+ pilot in the first quarter of 2027. Under the standard, customers would choose which participating payment service to use with a merchant’s QR code. SARB is also developing PEMKey, which would let people hold and manage reusable payment credentials in a digital wallet. Reuse would require customer consent and safeguards; the Oct. 20 address gave no launch date.
For regional payments, SARB targets moving qualifying transactions of up to R100,000 from SADC-RTGS to Transactions Cleared on an Immediate Basis (TCIB) by late April 2027. The schedule then calls for a hub-and-spoke pilot linking eight countries in October 2027.
