Home to one of Africa’s largest, most sophisticated economies and financial sectors, South Africa is a country of contrasts, offering world-class services in high-income urban areas while facing human development challenges including poverty, unemployment, and inequality.
H.M. Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, the United Nations Secretary General’s Special Advocate for Financial Health (UNSGSA), visited South Africa to support the private sector, policymakers, and financial sector authorities improve the financial health of South Africans. According to Finscope data, only 16% of adults in South Africa are financially healthy, down from 24% in 2023. Nearly 40% of South Africans struggle to plan ahead, with many prioritizing essential needs over saving for housing, business, or retirement. 53% of adults spend over 40% of their take home pay on debt.
The objective of the UNSGSA visit was to work with the private sector, policymakers, and financial sector authorities to improve the financial health of South Africans. The UNSGSA held high-level policy dialogues with public and regulatory authorities, including meetings with Minister of Finance Enoch Godongwana, Deputy Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, Dr. Mampho Modise, and key figures from the Financial Sector Conduct Authority and National Credit Regulator.
The UNSGSA engaged extensively with private sector leaders across the banking, fintech, insurance, and professional services sectors. Two private sector roundtables were also convened. The first, co-hosted with Mastercard, focused on scaling private-sector financial health solutions, and the second, co-hosted with Deloitte, addressed workplace financial health, including a focus on innovations in measurement, emergency savings, earned wage access, and financial coaching. The UNSGSA also delivered a keynote address during a fireside chat at the Responsible Finance Forum organized by Accion/Center for Financial Inclusion.
The UNSGSA championed financial health as a national priority, supporting the Unity Government’s objectives to drive inclusive growth and economic opportunity. The UNSGSA emphasized that improving financial health can support sustainable consumption and investment, increase productivity, and be a source of financial stability. With private sector leaders, the Special Advocate emphasized that financial health will not only improve customer outcomes, but can be a real source of economic competitiveness, driving financial growth and improving the bottom line.
The UNSGSA delegation also spent time with consumers, entrepreneurs, and community-based savings and loan groups (also known as stokvels). In Khayelitsha and greater Cape Town, the UNSGSA visited an informal entrepreneur who was able to save, take out affordable loans, and even invest money through a mission driven fintech leveraging alternative credit assessment methodologies. She witnessed firsthand how behavioral science is being applied in innovative financial health platforms that track, nudge, and guide individuals toward healthier financial behaviors. The UNSGSA spoke with stokvels about how they are partnering with banks to improve operational efficiency and expand access to accounts and insurance products for their members.
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Key Priorities
The UNSGSA identified seven key priorities to deepen financial health and build better customer outcomes in South Africa. The first three are cross-cutting issues that create an enabling environment for building financial health.
1. Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI): DPI has the potential to significantly lower the cost of financial inclusion while providing the foundation for citizens to transact and access services in the digital economy. Building on recent progress in DPI, discussions focused on accelerating the use of South Africa’s smart ID in financial services, expanding low-cost payment systems, and digitizing large-scale recurring payments—such as wages and social transfers—with embedded savings and financial health features.
2. Data Exchange: Data-driven innovation can support financial health, and the UNSGSA expressed support for the launch of a phased Open Finance roadmap in South Africa that includes clear provisions on consent, interoperability, use cases, and pricing, with an emphasis on consumer control, privacy, and trust in data use.
3. Enabling Regulation: South Africa’s regulatory framework currently restricts non-bank providers from issuing e-money or holding customer deposits. Discussions highlighted the need to create a level playing field between banks and fintechs to reduce the high costs of financial services and promote value added services and platforms that support financial health.
4. Building a Nation of Savers: The UNSGSA encouraged South African stakeholders to reignite South Africa’s savings culture through affordable and user-centric products such as low-cost, interest-bearing accounts from digital wallets, nudging and goal-based tools, and services that transition large volumes of informal savings to the formal financial system.
5. Promoting Responsible and Sustainable Credit: The UNSGSA encouraged public and private sector leaders to support affordable, flexible, and healthy borrowing by improving product design, offering tools to improve credit behavior and make informed decisions, and supporting the use of alternative data to responsibly extend credit to informal workers and the unbanked.
6. Private Sector Leadership on Financial Health: The private sector has a critical role to play in advancing financial health, and the UNSGSA encouraged South African financial institutions, and their industry bodies, employers, and innovation partners, to embed financial health in board-level strategy, encouraging measurement, strategy development, product and delivery channel innovation, and outcome monitoring.
7. Financial Health in National and Policy Regulatory Approaches: For national policy and regulation to translate into well-being at the household level, the UNSGSA encouraged South African policymakers and regulators to integrate financial health in the forthcoming national financial inclusion strategy, incorporate financial health metrics in risk-based supervision, and redirect financial education efforts to financial health outcomes.
UNSGSA Partners in South Africa
UNSGSA Reference Group members supporting this mission included the United Nations, World Bank, CGAP, Gates Foundation, International Finance Corporation, and Alliance for Financial Inclusion.