How rapid payments fit into South Africa’s modernising payment architecture

Steven Maier, Chief Brand Officer at Amplifin

In public conversation, rapid payments are often treated as a single product. However, in the National Payment System (NPS), rapid payments are better understood as a family of real-time payment behaviours that can occur across multiple rails, each with its own cost, timing, and operational profile.

From the South African Reserve Bank’s (SARB’s) perspective, modernisation is not about one new system. The Payments Ecosystem Modernisation (PEM) programme within Strategy 2030 sets a broader agenda.

It calls for digital payments that are fast, inclusive, interoperable, and efficient enough to support economic activity at scale. In practice, that means moving more use cases away from slow, opaque, batch processing towards real-time or near real-time value movement, while recognising that not every transaction needs to clear instantly.

Multiple rails, different behaviours

Most businesses already interact with several rails that can exhibit rapid payment behaviour. Real Time Clearing (RTC) supports high-value, real-time credits between banks. Same-day value EFT gives earlier access to funds than traditional two-day cycles. PayShap adds an instant, credit-push option with friendlier addressing for consumers. Standard RTGS remains available for large-value transfers and settlements. Collectively, these rails form a toolkit.

Cost is a key differentiator. RTC has been available for many years, but its high per-transaction pricing has limited its use to specific, high-value needs. PayShap was introduced with a different design objective and an economic model that better supports lower-value, higher-volume transactions.

At the same time, EFT remains the rational choice for bulk, low-urgency payments where a one or two-day lag is acceptable. Rapid payments are therefore not a replacement for batch EFT. They are an additional set of tools that allow instant movement of value where timing and customer experience justify the cost.

Visibility, risk, and real-time information

In a traditional batch environment, payment files are submitted at fixed cut-off times, leaving businesses waiting for confirmation and operating in uncertainty, unsure which payments have succeeded, which have failed, and which require action. This lag slows reconciliation and clouds cash-flow visibility. Real-time payments transform this experience, delivering immediate or near-instant confirmation and empowering businesses with clarity, confidence, and control the moment a payment is made.

The introduction of authenticated mandates and immediate or near-immediate responses in streams such as DebiCheck has already started to close that gap on the collections side. Rapid credit-push payments complete the picture by allowing receipts, payouts, and exceptions to be visible in close to real time.

Operational design, not technology hype

For business decision-makers, the shift is less about technology and more about operational design. Some flows should remain on existing rails. Salaries that follow a predictable cycle and supplier payments that are negotiated on standard terms do not always need to clear in seconds.

Other flows benefit strongly from rapid payments. These include loan disbursements into customer accounts or collections where a customer has already authenticated or given written consent in the form of a mandate and expects payment to reflect promptly. Batch payments remain appropriate where timing is predictable, and cost efficiency is prioritised. It is therefore important to select the payment option that matches the operational requirements for speed, cost, and risk control.

The evolving regulatory environment reinforces that discipline. As the SARB refines the NPS Act and brings more payment service providers under direct licensing and oversight, the intention is to enable non-bank participants to support payment accounts and, in time, participate more directly in settlement while maintaining systemic safety. Rapid payments cannot sit outside that framework. They must align with the same expectations for anti-money laundering controls, conduct regulation, and oversight that already apply to more traditional rails.

What clients will experience

The practical outcome for clients is a more responsive payments environment. As rapid payment capabilities mature, organisations will be able to see within minutes which customers have paid, move funds into and out of funding accounts with much shorter lags, and design customer journeys that do not pause for a day while money moves behind the scenes. At the same time, they will still be able to keep bulk, predictable flows on lower-cost batch rails where that makes sense.

Rapid payments recognise that the NPS is being reshaped to support real-time behaviour where it adds real value. For businesses, the work now is to understand how the different rails behave, what each one costs, and how to use them together to improve cash flow, reduce uncertainty, and serve customers at the pace of the rest of the digital economy.