News From Africa

The South Africa Reserve Bank (SARB) Outlines its Plans for Changes

In the past SARB only formally asked the traditional banking sector for comments on its detailed policies and regulations. Other interested parties could comment on published policies but this was not particularly structured. Slowly but surely new processes were introduced and now SARB has published a list of issues it welcomes all players in the financial sector to make comments on over the next months. This can be seen as the start of the process of inclusion which was the strategy behind the Payments Industry Body (PIB). PIB itself, as we reported previously, will have to wait until the COFI Bill is adopted by Parliament, probably at the end of this year or early in 2024. The EFSA Online Payments Committee is responsible for crafting EFSA’s common positions on these SARB policy proposals. Individual companies are encouraged to respond on the specifics of their business models, but a common view will be distilled for the ecommerce sector to submit. In this we are immensely grateful to the members of the Committee for their help and expertise.

From the SARB list of its future work programme, these are the issues EFSA will be commenting upon:

• Revised Unregulated and underregulated payment activities survey
• FATF Electronic funds Transfers Directive 1 OF 2022 guidance note 8
• Review of the National Payment System Act;
• Consultation paper on open banking activities in the NPS.
• Review of the Directive for conduct within the national payment system in respect of payments to third persons (Directive 1 of 2007);
• Consultation paper on Cloud Computing and offshoring of data;
• Regional clearing and settlement operator (RCSO) and Transactions cleared on an immediate basis (TCIB);
• National Payment System Framework and Strategy – Vision 2025 (Vision 2025) Action Plan;
• Digital payments roadmap; and
• Cyber resilience consultation paper.