While everyone was fixated on AI hype, South Africa quietly made its biggest leap in digital identity and payments in more than a decade. This was not a set of isolated government upgrades.
It was the first layer of a national digital foundation that will reshape how people verify themselves, move money, and access services.
Most businesses haven’t connected the dots yet.
But they need to.
Here’s what actually happened in 2025 — and why it matters.
1. SARB Restructured South Africa’s Payment Architecture
SARB made two moves that reset who gets to participate in the payment ecosystem and how transactions will work in the future.
First, it opened the National Payment System to non-bank fintechs. The Draft Directive and Draft Exemption Notice set out risk, AML, cybersecurity, and client-fund rules that allow non-banks to issue e-wallets, run instant payments, and operate directly on national rails without becoming banks.
This shifts SA away from a bank-only model and creates real competition and flexibility.
Second, SARB launched the Payments Ecosystem Modernisation programme. It focuses on upgrading RTGS, expanding faster-pay options like PayShap, and building a universal digital financial ID. The goal is a “cash-smart society” where digital payments are simple, low cost, and as routine as sending a text.
The message is clear: identity won’t sit beside South Africa’s transaction systems — it will run through them.
1. SARB Restructured South Africa’s Payment Architecture
SARB made two moves that reset who gets to participate in the payment ecosystem and how transactions will work in the future.
First, it opened the National Payment System to non-bank fintechs. The Draft Directive and Draft Exemption Notice set out risk, AML, cybersecurity, and client-fund rules that allow non-banks to issue e-wallets, run instant payments, and operate directly on national rails without becoming banks.
This shifts SA away from a bank-only model and creates real competition and flexibility.
Second, SARB launched the Payments Ecosystem Modernisation programme. It focuses on upgrading RTGS, expanding faster-pay options like PayShap, and building a universal digital financial ID. The goal is a “cash-smart society” where digital payments are simple, low cost, and as routine as sending a text.
The message is clear: identity won’t sit beside South Africa’s transaction systems — it will run through them.
2. Home Affairs began Rebuilding South Africa’s Identity Layer
At the same time, the Department of Home Affairs began executing a major digital overhaul under its 2025 – 2030 plan.
The department is moving from paper-heavy, manual processes to fully digital, automated services. Citizens will apply online for IDs, passports, and visas using facial recognition and biometrics. Travel authorisations will process instantly unless risk flags trigger review. Document collection will shift away from physical branches.
The centrepiece is a new biometric digital identity system developed with SARB for secure, online, cross-sector verification. The Home Affairs from Home vision aims to cut in-person visits drastically, with digital IDs expected in mobile wallets by 2028 or 2029.
This isn’t routine modernisation; it’s the foundation of a national, online-verifiable identity that business will rely on.
3. The MyMzansi – a Connected Identity, Payments, and Data Exchange
The MyMzansi Digital Transformation Roadmap is the first blueprint that ties all of this together. Led by the Digital Services Unit, it sets out how South Africa will build digital public infrastructure between 2025 and 2030.
Phase one, from 2025 – 2027, focuses on piloting a single digital identity, a national data exchange layer, a digital payments system, a wallet for verifiable credentials, and user-facing platforms like the MyMzansi app and central digital government portal.
Phase two, from 2027 – 2030, expands these tools into healthcare, education, and other sectors.
Identity, data exchange, and payments are now being designed as a single interoperable framework—replacing the old pattern of siloed systems patched together years later.
As those rails are built, the real leverage will not sit in any single system, but in the ecosystem they enable. When identity, payments and data exchange can move across institutions, you stop designing journeys around a branch visit or a static document – and start designing them around a trusted digital identity that can travel with the customer. MyMzansi points directly at that future: interoperable rails that banks, telcos, fintechs and platforms can all plug into.
4. Why this time is different
Anyone who has watched government tech projects over the years knows the pattern. Departments run in parallel, build overlapping systems, and struggle to integrate. The result is delay and duplication.
This year broke that pattern.
SARB, Home Affairs, and the Digital Services Unit are working on aligned pieces of a shared architecture. SARB is modernising transaction rails and creating a financial identifier. Home Affairs is upgrading biometric identity for secure online use. MyMzansi defines how identity, payments, and data exchange plug together at national scale.
Alignment is rare in government. When it happens, momentum builds fast. Businesses that assume this will move slowly are reading the moment wrong.
In that environment, most enterprises will not wire themselves into every rail, scheme and trust framework by hand. They will work through Integrated Identity Providers (IIPs) – platforms that absorb regulatory change, technology changes, new credentials and evolving DPI (digital public infrastructure) patterns, and present them as a consistent identity layer for onboarding, transactions and compliance. Contactable sits in that layer: an IIP that turns Africa’s emerging digital foundation into Identity for Enterprise – a configurable identity layer that can be embedded into real use cases without re-architecting core systems.
Who this affects
This shift touches every organisation that verifies identity, moves money, or carries risk – from banks, insurers and fintechs to telcos, retailers and platform businesses. As national rails mature, one-off KYC projects and bespoke verification stacks will start to look slow, expensive and brittle. Customers will expect to reuse a trusted digital identity, move between providers without re-onboarding, and resolve issues in minutes rather than weeks.
For leadership teams, the choice is whether to treat these changes as another compliance exercise – or as new infrastructure to compete on. The businesses that win will design around a shared identity layer rather than around paperwork: instant account opening, low-friction payouts, verified marketplaces, reusable KYC for partners and more. In other words, they will treat Identity for Enterprise as a strategic layer, not an administrative chore at the edge.
The real question for leadership teams in 2026 is simple,
“if 2025 built the new rails, will you keep treating identity as paperwork — or start treating it as infrastructure, plugged in via specialised identity providers and embedded into every real use case?”
