Walk up to an ATM today and the logo on it decides a lot. If your own bank's machine is out of order and you use someone else's, you can be charged what the Reserve Bank's Pradeep Maharaj calls a "disloyalty fee". The central bank now wants the logos gone altogether.
At a media briefing on Friday, it set out a plan to turn all of the country's roughly 30,000 ATMs into a shared, unbranded network that any bank's customer can use. Every machine would take deposits, pay out cash and show balances, and transactions below a certain amount would be free. That amount has not been set yet. For about 9,200 machines run by independent operators, deposits would be new, because they don't take cash in at all today.
Why cash costs the poorest most
Cash is expensive to keep moving. Notes are moved, counted and checked over and over, because each bank and cash-in-transit company runs its own cash centres, vehicles and routes. The Reserve Bank puts the cost at about R90 billion a year, and it is consumers who end up carrying it.
They don't carry it equally. The Reserve Bank's cost of cash study found people earning up to R1,250 a month spend about 5% of their income on cash-related costs, five times the share for those earning R20,000 or more. And as card and phone payments grow, the same vaults and trucks get spread over fewer transactions, so branches and ATMs in poorer and rural areas close first. There are more ATMs in Sandton City than in neighbouring Alexandra township.
What the banks still have to agree to
The shared ATMs sit on top of a bigger change. By March 2027 the Reserve Bank wants a national cash utility in place, and from the middle of that year it plans to start bringing the cash centres run by firms such as SBV and Fidelity into the central bank, so the same notes are handled fewer times. Maharaj said the utility will be wholly owned by the Reserve Bank, though a presentation in May suggested industry could get a stake, so the structure may yet shift.
None of it is binding yet. The banks have come back with models of their own, and the Reserve Bank has promised them a reply in November. Maharaj expects a robust conversation and insists the banks are not the target: "Banks are doing a great job, and will continue to do so." A pilot of shared machines starts in January, with the first batch due at the end of 2027 on the briefing's timeline, while Bloomberg reports a rollout starting in 2028.
Waiting is not free either. Maharaj said the cost of cash has to fall by at least 30% just for the system to stand still.
