South Africa has already built the technology to move money in seconds. The unresolved challenge is convincing banks to let customers use it without paying extra.
Interbank transfers have traditionally come with a fee, reflecting the cost of moving money between banks. PayShap, South Africa’s instant-payment rail, has been available to bank customers since 2023. Yet customers can still pay a fee at some banks for a transfer that takes seconds to complete, raising questions about whether instant payments should be priced as a premium service.
GoTyme Bank, South Africa’s digital-first challenger lender, is now challenging that model. The bank, formerly known as TymeBank, has offered free instant payments of up to R5,000 ($309) since launching PayShap for its customers in 2023. It is now calling on the wider banking industry to do the same.
“It’s not that the underlying payment infrastructure has no cost,” Marin Cundall, managing executive for digital experience at GoTyme Bank, told TechCabal on Friday. “Our position is that a modern, efficient bank can make a strategic choice not to pass every cost directly to the customer.”
The payment rail cost is only one part of the equation. According to Cundall, banks have different cost bases, product structures, and revenue models, meaning the customer fee is not determined solely by what it costs to process a PayShap transaction.
Cundall maintains that GoTyme’s digital-first model gives it more room to absorb costs rather than passing them directly to customers. “We see real-time payments as an essential part of everyday banking, not a premium service that customers should have to think twice about using,” she said.
That pricing becomes more consequential on smaller transactions, where even a small fee can represent a significant share of the amount being sent.
“A customer may accept a fee when transferring a large amount, but the same fee becomes difficult to justify when paying for lunch, settling a small service bill or sending a modest amount to a family member,” stated Cundall.
For small businesses, the difference is more practical. A plumber can confirm payment before leaving a job, while a spaza shop can verify that money has arrived before handing over goods. An entrepreneur who gets paid immediately can put that cash back into the business by restocking, paying a worker or settling a supplier.
“We need to stop accepting settlement periods of up to three days as normal,” Cundall explained. “When someone needs money for transport, food or electricity, two days is not a minor delay.”
Brazil’s Pix, an instant payments system, and India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) have made real-time digital payments part of everyday economic activity at enormous scale. GoTyme points to both systems as examples of what happens when real-time payments are treated as infrastructure for mass use rather than a premium feature.
Cheslyn Jacobs, CEO of GoTyme Bank, believes charging people to move their own money instantly is a choice rather than an unavoidable consequence of the technology.
“When your economy can’t move money freely, you’re leaving growth on the table,” he said.
A 2026 World Bank report says faster payments can accelerate liquidity by making funds available immediately, allowing businesses to use money sooner for stock, wages and other expenses.
Cundall is careful not to overstate the case: GoTyme has yet to quantify how free instant payments have changed cash usage or small and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) cash flow.
“We should not claim that free Instant Payments have already reduced cash usage or improved SME cash flow by a particular percentage unless we have measured and verified that outcome,” she said.
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