Reserve Bank moves to let fintechs plug straight into payments, ending the bank-only gate

The South African Reserve Bank has proposed rules that would let regulated fintechs, payment specialists and other non-bank providers reach the national payment system directly instead of going through a bank.

Governor Lesetja Kganyago set out the plan at the Payments Conference 2026, where he said the central bank intends to replace the current bank-centred access model with a new Authorisation Framework. The framework is due to be published by November 2026.

As Sunday World reported on 20 October, the proposal is aimed at boosting competition, lowering costs and speeding up innovation in digital payments. The Enquirer has not independently verified the reporting, which is consistent with the Reserve Bank’s stated position on opening up access.

Under the current arrangement, a business that wants to use the national payment system must do so through a bank. The Reserve Bank argues that while banks remain central to payments, many payment-related activities do not need a banking licence and should not face the same regulatory barriers.

Its reasoning rests on the difference between a payment company and a bank. Banks take short-term deposits and use them to fund long-term assets, a practice known as maturity transformation that creates systemic risk and justifies stricter regulation. Payment firms do not do this, the central bank says, so their rules should be tailored to the risks they actually create.

“The principle is straightforward: similar activities and similar risks should receive similar regulatory treatment,” Kganyago said.

Non-bank participants would still face requirements on governance, safeguarding customer funds, operational resilience and reporting. What changes is the tailoring, not the existence of supervision.

For an ordinary South African, the practical question is whether any of this shows up in the cost and speed of moving money. The Reserve Bank is coupling the access reform to a push on PayShap, the real-time payments platform launched in 2023. PayShap has processed more than one billion transactions worth over R1-trillion since inception, but the central bank says usage remains well below its potential and represents only a fraction of card payment volumes and electronic funds transfer transactions.

Kganyago identified four constraints holding adoption back: inconsistent customer experiences across banks, varying pricing models, low public awareness and limited merchant acceptance. The Reserve Bank says resolving these is essential if PayShap is to become a widely used alternative to cash for everyday transactions.

The central bank also warned against the unchecked growth of closed-loop payment systems that run independently of the wider payments ecosystem. It accepts that closed systems can support experimentation and innovation, but says larger platforms should face growing obligations to connect with the broader network as they scale.

Kganyago likened the approach to the “Spider-Man rule”: greater market power should come with greater responsibility for interoperability and customer choice. The Reserve Bank restated its longstanding position that it does not support separate, independent payment systems that could fragment the market.

Two further pieces of the reform programme are aimed squarely at the shop counter. QR+ is a proposed interoperable QR code standard meant to make digital merchant payments cheaper and easier, letting a consumer pay through their preferred provider using a single QR code displayed by the merchant and reducing reliance on specialised point-of-sale equipment. The Reserve Bank expects to begin piloting QR+ in the first quarter of 2027.

It is also developing a single digital identity for payments, known as PEMKey, which would let users store verified credentials in a digital wallet and reuse them across multiple service providers.

Beyond South Africa’s borders, the Reserve Bank is pursuing faster and cheaper cross-border payments within the Southern African Development Community. It plans to move qualifying regional transactions below R100,000 onto the Transactions Cleared on an Immediate Basis platform by April 2027, with a hub-and-spoke pilot involving eight countries expected by October 2027. That pilot would let participants connect through a common regional payments hub rather than through multiple bilateral arrangements.

The Reserve Bank has framed the programme as bringing South Africa’s payments infrastructure closer to systems operating in countries such as Brazil, India and the Philippines. The concrete test for readers will arrive with the November 2026 framework and, after it, with whether the promised savings and the promised PayShap uptake follow.