KASITECH BUILDERS: a new FINASA series on the structural challenges facing South Africa’s informal economy, and the members building solutions on the ground.
KASITECH BUILDERS SERIES
02 // The 10 Rand Problem
Why some of South Africa’s smallest everyday payments are still harder than they should be, and what the R10 problem tells us about where the system still needs work.
Featuring Remy Waner // Founder of No-Cash Payments
5 min read
South Africa can move money faster than ever, yet a simple R10 payment to a petrol attendant or car guard still exposes a stubborn gap between the people our payment systems can recognise, the economics of tiny transactions, and the infrastructure needed to make them work.
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parking attendant who watched your car. A petrol attendant who filled your tank. The man who sells newspapers at the robot. Each has just done something for you and you want to pay them R10 cash, which you don’t have. You can pay R1,000 for petrol in seconds. The R10 for the person who pumped it, guarded your car, or sold you a paper depends on whether you happen to have a note in your wallet.
Remy Waner has spent the past few years building toward closing that gap. He’s a banker who runs No-Cash Payments, a PASA-approved, Standard Bank-sponsored platform that lets workers like these accept a tip without the customer needing an app or an account.
At first glance, the gap looks like an adoption problem: perhaps workers are wary of digital payments, or customers simply do not want another payment method. Remy’s experience has pointed in a different direction.
What’s surprised him most isn’t resistance. It’s the opposite.
“The biggest surprise has been how many people immediately understand the problem,” he says. The workers and businesses he onboards are usually already familiar with QR payments. What has been missing is access to a working system they can use to receive them.
This was never really a story about people not understanding the technology or not wanting to be paid digitally.
“The problem was therefore not always a lack of money or willingness to pay,” Remy says. “It was a lack of a simple bridge between the payer and the recipient.”
For the person on the other side of that gap, the stakes are real. Income built on tips and small cash payments is unpredictable to begin with. It moves with the weather, with foot traffic, with whatever shift they’ve been given. Cash adds its own ‘tax’ on top of that: it gets lost, it gets stolen, and it’s nearly impossible to reconcile.
There’s a quieter cost too. A cash tip leaves no record, no proof of income to show a bank, an insurer or a credit provider later. What looks like a small, forgettable transaction to everyone else is somebody’s actual income, and part of their financial history disappearing along with it.
SMALL PAYMENTS, BIG COSTS
For the recipient, a missed R10 matters. For anyone trying to digitise that payment, the challenge runs in the opposite direction: there is very little value in the transaction to absorb the cost of making it happen.
“Typical transactions range from R5 to R100,” Remy says. At that size, the normal cost of moving money, processing fees, settlement, onboarding, support, stops making sense. A fee structure built to comfortably absorb a R500 payment doesn’t shrink cleanly down to R10.
There’s a trust cost too, one that doesn’t show up on an invoice. The customer needs to know they’re paying the right person. The recipient needs to know the money will actually land. If either side doubts the transaction, it doesn’t happen, no matter how good the technology is.
Cost and trust are only part of the equation. Convenience matters just as much. Someone walking back to their car after shopping is unlikely to download an app, create an account or work through a multi-step payment flow for R10. At this value, even a little friction can be enough for the payment not to happen.
THE INFRASTRUCTURE HURDLE FOR SMALL FINTECHS
Building a way to accept the payment was, in some ways, the more straightforward part. Behind it, Remy has had to build onboarding, identity verification, settlement, reporting and reconciliation, an entire layer of infrastructure most customers never see, just to get a R10 tip to land safely and provably in the right account.
Even having built all of that, there’s a structural wall on the other side.
For smaller fintechs, securing the bank sponsorship and infrastructure access needed to operate can be a hurdle in its own right.
Remy argues that volume thresholds and commercial requirements can create a sequencing problem: “A fintech needs access to infrastructure to scale, but it needs scale before it can access the infrastructure.”
His point is not that banks should lower the bar on risk or compliance. It is that clearer sponsorship pathways, workable API access and proportionate commercial requirements can make it easier for credible smaller fintechs to prove a use case before they have reached major scale.
WHAT THE INDUSTRY STILL GETS WRONG
Layered on top of the economics and the infrastructure hurdles is a perception problem.
The township and informal economy tends to get talked about as a single market. Remy pushes back on that. It’s micro-merchants, foreign nationals, casual workers, and formally employed people like petrol attendants, each facing a different version of the same acceptance gap, not one homogenous group waiting for the same product.
It’s also relationship-driven in a way a slicker interface doesn’t fix on its own. Trust gets built through visible presence and local partnerships, not a better app. A technically impressive product that skips that step won’t survive contact with the market it’s meant to serve.
WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE
No single company can resolve this on its own. Some of the levers sit higher up the payments stack.
South Africa’s Payments Ecosystem Modernisation programme is already tackling the infrastructure layer, with interoperable QR acceptance, real-time payments, proxy-based payments and modern digital identity among the capabilities in focus.
For the R10 problem, the test is whether those improvements make small payments cheaper and easier in practice.
Banks could also treat this as a commercial market rather than a CSR problem, with clearer sponsorship pathways, workable API access and onboarding that does not assume a fintech already has the scale it is trying to reach.
Just as important is who shapes that infrastructure. Founders working directly with these users see where onboarding breaks, fees become uneconomical, payment flows ask too much of users and trust is lost. That evidence should be in the room while systems are being designed, not added after the fact. Otherwise, technically sound infrastructure can still fail in the environments it is meant to serve.
“We see behaviours and constraints that are not always visible from a boardroom or policy document,” Remy says.
THE R10 PROBLEM IS STILL OPEN
Across the industry, the R10 problem is being approached from different directions: new acceptance models, faster rails, interoperable QR, proxy payments, digital identity and better infrastructure access. None is a complete answer on its own.
“Financial inclusion will not be achieved by one product or one institution,” he says. “It will be achieved through an ecosystem that allows innovation to reach the people who have historically been excluded from payment acceptance.”
Small-value payments will not become easier because one product succeeds. They become easier when the economics, infrastructure and rules allow different providers to solve different versions of the problem.
That work is already happening across banks, payment providers and fintechs. The challenge is turning those efforts into something that works for the transaction itself.
For the R10 payment, the test is demanding: fast enough that a customer will use it, trusted enough for both sides, and cheap enough to work at scale.
That remains a payments problem worth solving.
ABOUT REMY WANER
Remy Waner is the founder of No-Cash Payments. 28 years old, South African born and bred. Passionate about building for Africa. He studied accounting at the University of the Witwatersrand before beginning his banking career at Investec, where his engagement within world-class financial services and client experiences allowed him to direct and adapt these skills to the underserved markets.
ABOUT NO-CASH PAYMENTS
No-Cash Payments (Pty) Ltd is a South African payments fintech enabling frontline and informal workers to receive digital tips and low-value payments through verified QR profiles, without requiring the payer to download an app or create an account.
As a PASA-approved, Standard Bank-sponsored TPPP/BSP, No-Cash combines secure payment acceptance, recipient allocation, settlement support and business reporting to help connect South Africa’s modern payment infrastructure with workers and communities at the last mile.
Our main mission is financial inclusion.