BANKING BEGINS WHERE PAYMENTS END

By Richard de Roos, Group Head of Payments, Standard Bank Group

When a payment works, nobody notices. A salary arrives, a supplier is paid, a card is tapped at a till, and a family sends money across a border. The transaction takes seconds, then life carries on.

That apparent simplicity hides an extraordinary system. In 2025, in a six-month period, Standard Bank processed more than R164 trillion in payments across 20 million clients. Spread across the year, that is roughly R5.2 million every second. The figure is striking, but scale is only part of the story. The more interesting question is what this activity makes possible.

Banks have spent decades making payments safer, quicker, and more reliable. Those fundamentals remain sacrosanct. Trust can disappear in a single failed or fraudulent transaction, and once it goes, convenience counts for very little. But speed and reliability are becoming the price of entry. Customers simply expect both.

This is pushing payments towards the status of infrastructure: indispensable, largely invisible, and valuable because of what can be built on top of it. Electricity is useful on its own, but its economic value comes from the factories, homes and businesses it powers. Payment rails are heading in a similar direction.

A payment carries context. A regular salary deposit says something about income. Supplier payments show that a business is trading. A change in the rhythm of receipts can signal growth, seasonality or pressure on cash flow. School fees, insurance premiums and inventory purchases each reveal a different part of a customer’s financial life.

Handled responsibly, these signals can help a bank serve clients with greater relevance. A small business should not have to wait for an annual financial statement before its bank recognises that turnover is rising. An entrepreneur with a healthy pattern of receipts should be able to access working capital that reflects the business they are actually running. A customer showing early signs of financial strain should receive practical support before the problem becomes a crisis.

This is where artificial intelligence earns its place in the payments discussion. The attraction is not a futuristic chatbot or another layer of technology for its own sake. It is the ability to recognise patterns across vast volumes of activity, strengthen fraud detection and make better decisions at the moment they matter.

The discipline around that use of data matters just as much as the technology. Payment information is deeply personal. Clients must know that their information is secure, that decisions can be explained and that technology is being used to help them rather than exploit them. Regulation, governance and human judgement are therefore central to innovation, not obstacles placed in its way.

South Africa has strong foundations for this next phase. Its banking system is sophisticated, the regulatory environment is robust, and initiatives such as PayShap show what industry collaboration can achieve. The next test is whether instant payments become part of ordinary economic life: paying a trader, settling an invoice, collecting from a customer or sending money to a relative without friction or unnecessary cost.

Cash will remain part of the economy for some time. It is familiar, immediate, and widely accepted. Yet cash is expensive to distribute and leaves little usable financial history for the person or business relying on it. Moving more activity into trusted digital channels creates a record that can support credit, insurance and other services. For many small firms, that record may become as important as the payment itself.

The opportunity becomes even larger when we look beyond South Africa’s borders. African trade still carries too much friction. A payment between neighbouring markets can take longer and cost more than the transaction deserves. Businesses feel that burden in working capital, delayed settlement, and uncertainty.

Banks, fintechs, mobile money operators, payment providers and central banks all have a role in fixing this. The objective should not be a collection of closed systems, each efficient inside its own walls. Africa needs connections between those systems, with common standards and trusted rules that allow value to move safely across markets.

New technologies, including tokenised deposits and regulated forms of digital money, may help shorten settlement times and lower the cost of cross-border payments. Their usefulness will be measured by the problem they solve, not by the excitement around the technology. If they make it easier for an exporter to get paid, for a migrant worker to support a family or for an African business to trade in another market, they have earned a place in the system.

Fintechs have already shown the value of focus and speed. They find neglected problems, simplify the customer experience and bring products to market quickly. Banks contribute scale, liquidity, risk management, and the trust created by operating inside a regulated system. The strongest outcomes will often come from competition and partnership at the same time.

For banks, this changes the basis on which relevance is earned. Processing the transaction is not enough. The real test is whether the institution can turn the activity around that transaction into useful, timely and fair support for the client.

That could mean spotting fraud before money leaves an account. It could mean offering a merchant working capital when sales data shows that the business is ready to expand. It could mean giving a treasurer a clearer view of liquidity across several markets. It could also mean knowing when to do nothing, because trust includes restraint.

The payment is the moment when a bank is closest to the daily life of a customer or business. It is where commerce happens, where trust is tested and where financial behaviour becomes visible. The institutions that understand that context and use it with care, will be better placed to support growth across the continent.

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