South Africa's economy does not keep office hours. The spaza shop restocks when the delivery arrives, not when a branch opens. The taxi rank trades from before dawn. The informal, or kasi, economy – estimated to move more than R600 billion a year – runs on immediacy: cash in, stock out, paid today, spent today.
Yet the money underneath all of it still clocks off at five. A worker paid on a Friday afternoon can watch the funds sit in limbo until Monday. A trader who accepts a payment can wait a day or more before it is usable. For anyone with a financial buffer, that delay is a mild irritation. For the millions living closest to the edge, the wait itself is the cost.
South Africa has spent the past few years bolting instant payment rails onto banks that still think in business days.
PayShap and real-time clearing have arrived, and people have taken to them fast – in the first five months of 2026, South Africans were making an average of roughly 89 million PayShap payments a month, up from around 45 million as recently as late last year, most of them under R500.
That figure tells you exactly who is driving real-time payments: not corporates moving millions, but ordinary people moving small amounts that need to land now. The demand is settled, but the problem is that a payment is only ever as instant as the system standing behind it.
The money that clocks off at five
Banking hours are not a customer-service decision at all, really. They are a feature of the technology underneath. Some South African banks still run on core banking systems designed a long time ago, in which the ledger that holds an account and the logic that processes a payment were built as one and the same system.
That made sense in a world of overnight batch processing, where every transaction waited for the same nightly cycle regardless of what it was for. It makes far less sense now, when a R50 grocery payment and a R5 million settlement are forced through, essentially, the same queue.
The consequences are not evenly shared, though. A salaried customer with savings can absorb a weekend delay without noticing. But a domestic worker, a seasonal farmhand or a market trader cannot. When wages are paid late or held in clearing, the knock-on effects are immediate and tangible: a missed restock, a deposit that lapses, a day's trading lost because the float never arrived. Studies of cash-based payroll in South Africa show how much value leaks out in the gap between earning money and being able to use it – in the travel to draw it, the time away from work, and the simple uncertainty of when it will land.
Slow money is idle money
There is a macroeconomic cost to all of this that also rarely gets discussed. Money sitting in transit is money the economy cannot use.
Every hour a payment spends in clearing is an hour that liquidity is frozen, and therefore not spent, not banked, not put back to work in any way that builds instead of sits.
In a wealthy economy with deep reserves, that friction is quite tolerable. In one as liquidity-constrained and unequal as ours, the speed at which money changes hands is in a very real way a developmental one.
When money moves the moment it is needed, it does more work. A trader restocks and sells again the same day. A small business meets a supplier deadline it would otherwise have missed.
A household covers an emergency without reaching for a costly informal loan.
Velocity, in a country like ours, is one of the most underrated tools we have for inclusion – and whether payments can move independently of the ledger's own pace is either the thing that enables that or the thing that holds it back. No bank wants to hold inclusion or growth back; they have a front-row seat to what it costs people, businesses and the economy when money sits still.
Like a large ship needing mechanical work, core modernisation has been a daunting task for years. Unlike a ship, though, a bank cannot go into drydock for months while the work gets done – which is exactly why the fix that doesn't require drydock is the one worth having.
Opening the doors
Through its Payments Ecosystem Modernisation programme, the South African Reserve Bank is preparing to open the national payment system to non-bank players – fintechs and others who will be able to offer payment services without first becoming banks.
The intent is to widen access and reach the customers traditional institutions have struggled to serve.
This model has already been successful in UK and Europe via Open banking which resulted in the birth of numerous PISPs and EMI’s (non-bank Payment Initiation Service Providers and E-Money Institutions).
This is also relevant in South Africa as mobile penetration is already very high in the region and many mobile operators offer wallets which are available 24 by 7 by 365.
Banks can also leverage the mobile network operators which can originate payments and the mobile wallet acts as a store of value which is available all the time and real time.
A more open system only works, though, if the institutions inside it can actually connect to one another in real time, and that is a payments question before it is a core question.
Legacy cores were built as closed boxes, with payment logic locked inside them; they were never designed to let an outside fintech, a merchant platform or a marketplace plug in and transact instantly.
A decoupled payment layer changes that starting premise, because it is the layer built to be plugged into – exposing its services so a bank can let new partners reach its customers, and reach new customers through theirs, in minutes rather than quarters. The institutions that separate payments from the core will be the ones able to participate in the ecosystem the central bank is building. The ones that wait for a full core rebuild will watch it form without them.
South Africa has done the hard, collaborative work of building rails that can move money in seconds. The unfinished work is not rebuilding the core to match them; it is freeing the payment from the core so it never actually would have had to wait on it in the first place.
Eshmael Mpabanga – Regional Head – Southern Africa & Senior Vice President, Intellect Design Arena Ltd.
**The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Media Group.