The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) plans to open the national payment system to non-banks from mid-2027. Telecoms operators, fintechs and retailers will be able to connect to it directly, with no intermediary bank. TechFinancials reported the regulator’s plans on 19 October. Three days earlier, details had emerged of a related reform covering cash and ATMs.
No bank in the middle
A non-bank in South Africa is already perfectly able to launch a wallet or a payments app. But the only way it can reach the settlement system is through a sponsoring bank, which charges its own fee and sets its own rules. Wallets run by mobile operators and money transfers at supermarket tills have long been part of everyday life, yet they are still settled through a bank. For the banks’ competitors, this is arguably the biggest drag.
The regulator has promised to publish the rules for the new access regime in November 2026. Licensed non-bank participants are expected to start connecting around March 2027 and to be fully operational by mid-year. In the first phase, they will be allowed to carry out seven types of activity in their own right. These include e-money issuance, acquiring and payment initiation.
Of these, acquiring is the one that matters directly to payment service providers and, through them, to any online business. Online casinos illustrate the point well, since players there may deposit and withdraw several times in a single evening. Casinos take payments through providers, and every link between the player’s card and the operator’s account adds a fee and a few more minutes of waiting. For Spinchester, with its slots and crash games, the length of that chain matters more than it does for an online shop whose customers pay once a month. As the regulator sees it, connecting acquirers directly to the system cuts out one link.
PayShap is still well short of its target
The country already has the rails for instant payments. PayShap currently handles around 60 million transactions a month and is meant to reach 500 million by 2029. That is more than an eightfold increase. It looks unlikely that the banks can manage that pace on their own.
The QR+ standard is also due in November. Banks are bringing customers onto instant payments at their own pace. Telecoms operators and retail chains are better placed to reach people with no account at all (or one opened only to receive a salary and used for nothing else). The regulator seems to be counting on the new participants to speed up the shift from banknotes to digital payments.
ATMs without logos
The second part of the reform came to light on 16 October. Under the proposal, more than 30,000 ATMs in South Africa would become a shared network without bank branding, known as white-label ATMs. Small transactions at these machines are meant to be free.
The country has around 30,600 machines in total. Roughly 9,200 of them belong to independent operators and do not take deposits, meaning they only dispense cash.
The timetable is mapped out month by month. A white-label ATM pilot is scheduled for January 2027, and a national cash utility, a shared cash operator, is due to be set up in March. The first batch of shared ATMs is promised before the end of 2027. Frankly, that is a tight schedule for a project that will mean negotiating with all the major banks at once.
Cash is not going anywhere
Cash accounts for 56% of consumer transactions in South Africa by volume. Handling it costs the economy R88.5bn a year, or roughly 1.2% of GDP.
That is why the two reforms go together. The regulator is opening digital payments to newcomers so that they can grow faster. It is making cash cheaper by pooling infrastructure that is currently split between the banks and independent operators. If both reforms stay on schedule, the big banks will lose control over access to the payment system. Nor will their own ATM networks give them an edge any longer.
What comes next
The next milestone is November, when the access rules and QR+ are due to be published. They will show how strict the licensing and capital requirements turn out to be. If the bar is set high, only the large telecoms operators and retailers will make it into the system. Smaller fintechs will have to keep working through banks for a while yet.
