South Africa has the most developed financial system on the continent, but it has not rushed to mandate open banking. The regulator’s route is open finance, built gradually through policy and new conduct legislation rather than one prescriptive rulebook. The current position runs from the Financial Sector Conduct Authority’s 2024 open finance recommendations to the Conduct of Financial Institutions Bill now before Parliament.
South Africa runs a twin-peaks regulatory model. The South African Reserve Bank handles prudential regulation and financial stability, while the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) handles market conduct. The banking sector is concentrated around a handful of large banks, card and electronic payments are widespread, and account ownership is high by regional standards, helped by the social grants that reach millions of people every month. This is a market with deep financial data and the infrastructure to move it, which is part of why open finance is being handled carefully rather than quickly.
In March 2024 the FSCA published its open finance policy recommendations, setting out how consumer-permissioned data sharing could work across the wider financial sector rather than banking alone. The authority is now developing a fuller Open Finance Policy Position alongside the Intergovernmental Fintech Working Group, and it has said this is likely to lead to legislative intervention on a phased, prioritised basis. South Africa is deliberately choosing open finance, a broader idea than open banking, and sequencing it step by step.
The main vehicle for that change is the Conduct of Financial Institutions Bill, known as COFI. The Minister of Finance published notice of its introduction to the National Assembly in April 2026, and the FSCA describes it as the most significant financial-sector legislative development in recent memory. COFI moves the country from fragmented, rules-based supervision toward a single outcomes-based conduct framework. Once it is in force, the standards that would govern data sharing and open finance can sit under it, which is why the FSCA is aligning the two timelines rather than issuing an open banking standard on its own.
While the framework matures, the payment rails are already changing. PayShap, the low-value real-time payment service launched in 2023, has pushed instant account-to-account transfers into everyday use and given banks and fintechs a modern rail to build on. On the regional side, the Reserve Bank runs the SADC real-time gross settlement system that clears cross-border payments across Southern Africa, and the TCIB scheme handles low-value cross-border transfers and bridges into the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System. These are the rails any future open finance services would plug into.
South Africa is not about to publish a prescriptive open banking mandate, and the older expectation of a final position paper in 2024 or 2025 has been overtaken by the open finance route. The realistic path is open finance delivered through COFI and phased FSCA standards, resting on the data and payment infrastructure the country already has. For anyone watching the continent, South Africa is the market where the question is not whether open finance happens, but how quickly the legislation moves.
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Open Banking Nigeria (Open Technology Foundation) is a non-profit backed by a group of industry experts across banking, fintech, risk management, and more to drive and launch the open banking standard in Nigeria.
