Three years after PayShap launched as South Africa’s real-time payment system, the technology behind instant bank transfers is no longer in question. What remains unresolved is why millions of South Africans are still paying a fee simply to move their own money from one account to another.
Digital challenger banks are now pushing back on that status quo, arguing that instant payments should be treated as a standard part of banking rather than a paid add-on. Cheslyn Jacobs, CEO of GoTyme Bank South Africa, told TechCabal that every bank sets its own commercial and pricing strategy, but that GoTyme views instant payments as core banking, not a premium feature.
PayShap was built to make digital payments faster, cheaper and more accessible, with a particular focus on lower-income consumers and the informal economy, where cash still dominates daily transactions. Wider adoption of the system could also cut the cost and risk that small businesses face when handling cash. Yet even though most major banks now run on the same payment rail, pricing across the industry remains far from uniform, a sign that competition has shifted away from the payment technology itself and toward the broader digital banking experience.
According to publicly available pricing, GoTyme Bank offers PayShap transfers free of charge across all supported transaction values. Other banks charge anywhere from roughly R1 to R10 per transfer, while Discovery Bank charges up to 0.5 percent of the transaction value, capped at R35. Nedbank, one of the country’s big four banks, charges different fees depending on whether the money is sent to a cellphone number or straight to a bank account. For everyday users, especially those sending money to family, paying domestic workers, splitting bills or paying small vendors, those small charges add up quickly over time.
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Jacobs argues that the real opportunity for banks is not just to make payments faster, but to make digital payments so simple and accessible that they become the default way South Africans move money, replacing cash entirely. Whether that vision includes free instant transfers as an industry standard is still unclear. South Africa’s largest banks continue to generate meaningful revenue from payment services, and none of them has signaled plans to eliminate transaction fees altogether in the near term.
The pricing gap also reflects a longer-running tension in the country’s banking sector. When PayShap first launched, some of the big four banks were reportedly reluctant to promote it heavily, since a free or low-cost instant payment channel threatened revenue they were already earning from older real-time payment systems. That hesitation shaped how visible, or invisible, PayShap has been inside various banking apps, and it continues to influence how aggressively each bank markets its pricing today.
For now, the fee gap between digital challenger banks and traditional players remains one of the clearest signals of where South Africa’s banking competition is actually heading. As more consumers compare what they pay to send money instantly, pricing on services like PayShap could become just as important a battleground as interest rates or account fees have traditionally been.
