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
01 // The Invisible Economy
Why financial visibility could be the missing piece of the South Africa's financial inclusion story.
Featuring Sunesh Bhoola // Founder of Sorted
8 min read
Millions of thriving South African businesses keep no financial records at all. That single missing habit locks them out of credit, insurance, and growth, and fixing it may be the most underrated financial inclusion opportunity in the country.
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very day, millions of South Africans buy bread from a spaza shop, get their hair braided at a salon with no signage, buy a plate of amagwinya from a woman working a folding table near the taxi rank, or top up their airtime from a trader who has never once printed an invoice in his or her life.
These businesses are everywhere you look, so common that it would be hard to walk a single block in most South African neighbourhoods without passing five or six of them, humming along quietly in the background of everyday life. And yet, to much of the country’s formal financial system, they simply don’t exist.That isn’t because they aren’t profitable, and it isn’t because they aren’t growing. It’s because they leave behind almost none of the financial footprints the formal economy was built to recognise: no invoices, no bank statements, no VAT returns, nothing a credit model or a bank manager has ever been trained to read.That invisibility isn’t just costing individual entrepreneurs a loan they’ll never get approved for. It’s costing South Africa one of its biggest economic advantages, and almost nobody is treating it as the emergency it actually is.
Few people are better placed to explain why than Sunesh Bhoola. A Chartered Accountant and senior corporate executive based in Johannesburg, Bhoola has spent his career inside the formal economy’s engine rooms, moving through manufacturing, logistics, and soft commodities trading, building the spreadsheets and validating the assessments that decide who the system considers bankable.
But the informal economy was never an abstraction to him either. “Mum and gran ran a home industry business to supplement household income,” he says, “so the micro economy has always been personal to me.”
Today, as the founder of FINASA member sorted, he’s building for the traders that his old world was never designed to see, which gives him a rare qualification: he has watched this problem from both sides of the table.
We Measure Everything. Except This.
It’s a strange problem to still have in 2026. We have satellites that can count cars in a parking lot from orbit. We have AI models that read a handwritten receipt in half a second. There is more data flowing through the South African economy than at any point in its history. And still, nobody quite agrees on how big the informal economy actually is.
“There’s no definitive number for the size of this market or how to reach it,” Bhoola says. “Even corporates who’ve looked at this space work off estimates and guesswork built on consumption patterns, not real visibility. That gap, between how much we’re capable of measuring and how little we actually see, is what convinced me this was worth solving.”
He isn’t exaggerating about the guesswork. Stats SA puts informal-sector employment at just under a fifth of all jobs in the country, while outside estimates of the sector’s rand value range from several hundred billion to well over a trillion, depending entirely on the methodology. Officially, unemployment sits above 30%. But when Gerrie Fourie, the former CEO of Capitec, suggested publicly that the real number could be closer to 10% once the informal sector was properly counted, GG Alcock, the country’s foremost chronicler of that sector, agreed, putting his own estimate at somewhere between 12% and 15%.That’s not a rounding error. That’s a twenty-point gap in one of the most important numbers a country produces about itself. “We’re better equipped than any generation before us,” as Bhoola puts it, “and yet we can’t see what’s right in front of us.”
Invisible Doesn’t Mean Small.
Part of the problem is the word itself. People hear “invisible” and assume it means insignificant, small, a rounding error of its own. It doesn’t work that way at all. Invisible simply means unmeasured, and those are two very different things to confuse, so different that conflating them may be the single biggest mistake South Africa’s financial system has made about its own economy.
Nobody has documented this more thoroughly than GG Alcock, whose books on what he calls the kasi economy trace the enormous scale hidden inside South Africa’s townships, from spaza shop supply chains to shisanyama grills and the kota trade. For Bhoola, reading that work was the turning point. “What hit home was his point that we drive past these businesses every day, the lady on the corner selling sweets and veg, the guys at the traffic lights, the food stalls, the hair salons, the tradesperson you call for a rush job, and they’re genuinely invisible to us unless you train yourself to see them,” he says. “That was the moment I decided it was time to stop observing and start trying to solve it.”
Our informal sector is not a survival economy limping along at the margins. “This isn’t survivalist activity,” Bhoola says. “It’s a real, functioning economy of people serving their own communities.” These businesses, in his words, are “not surviving despite the lack of formal support, they’re succeeding without it.”
The Records Gap Is The Root Of It.
Look closely at why these businesses stay unseen, and one cause sits underneath almost all the others: the absence of financial records.
“The broader financial ecosystem was built to ignore anything that doesn’t meet a fairly narrow set of criteria,” Bhoola explains. “A bank account tied to the business, a habit of issuing invoices, someone dedicated to bookkeeping. Most informal operators have none of that by default. They have cash, a phone, and margins too thin to spend on learning accounting software.”
The consequences compound quietly. “You can’t plan for where you want to get to if you don’t know where you’re starting from,” he says. “Without that baseline, there’s no proof of trading history to show a supplier when you want extended terms, and no evidence to offer a lender other than trust, which usually means either no capital, or capital at informal-lender rates that make growth harder rather than easier.”
Each locked door leads to the next: no records means no provable income, no provable income means no credit, no credit means no bulk stock, no cushion for a slow month, no second location. Every one of those doors traces back to the same missing key.None of this reflects on the businesses themselves. “Invisibility isn’t a reflection of these businesses being unviable,” as Bhoola puts it. “It’s a reflection of infrastructure that was never built to see them in the first place.”And the proof that the infrastructure can be built differently is already trading on the JSE. “The businesses growing fastest in South Africa right now, Capitec, Boxer, PEP among them, are the ones that adapted their systems and processes to actually include this segment instead of screening it out,” Bhoola points out. The market has already rewarded the companies that learned to see.
Stop Calling It High Risk.
“It’s a visibility problem being misread as a capability problem.”
That line, from Bhoola, deserves to hang over the whole industry, because for years the financial sector has treated the informal economy as inherently risky: too unpredictable to lend to, too cash-based to insure, too informal to trust. “The mistake is treating informal as a stand-in for high-risk or unsophisticated,” he says, “when the real barrier is that the data trail these institutions rely on to assess risk simply doesn’t exist yet for this segment.”
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The problem runs deeper than attitudes. It’s baked into the models themselves. “Most underwriting models are built around a formal, well-documented borrower,” Bhoola explains, “so an informal business doesn’t come out looking risky. It comes out looking unreadable to the model entirely.” An unreadable business gets the same answer as a bad one, and that, more than any prejudice, is how millions of viable enterprises end up priced out of the system. The fix he proposes is structural: “building risk models around a different data set from the start, not just relaxing the same document checklist.”
What Solving It Actually Looks Like.
If the root problem is that record-keeping was never designed for these businesses, then the solution has to start from a different question. Not how to get traders to adopt proper bookkeeping, but what bookkeeping would look like if it were designed around how they already work.
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The answer, increasingly, is that it looks like the tools people already carry. Close to 28 million South Africans open WhatsApp every single day, and that daily habit is infrastructure, arguably more reliable infrastructure than anything the formal system has ever managed to place in a township. “It’s where the market already is,” Bhoola says of the platform. “It meant we didn’t have to build a new habit. We could build inside one that already exists, including the code-switching between languages that’s completely normal in everyday township communication but that most software never accounts for.”
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Sorted, his company, is one example of the approach: a trader texts , sends a voice note or photo via WhatsApp about a sale or an expense, and the record-keeping happens from there, with no app to download and nothing new to learn. “Managing your business finances becomes as easy as having a conversation,” he says.
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What’s striking is how little resistance there’s been, which says less about any one product and more about how wrong the industry’s assumptions were. “They embrace it readily,” Bhoola says of township entrepreneurs and technology. “Anything that makes the day-to-day easier and is affordable gets adopted fast. The barrier was never willingness. It was whether the right tool existed in the right place.” His early users are already asking for more, not less. “We’ve had founding merchants come back with requests to build in additional features to help them manage their business better, which tells us something important: our market already knows what it needs. They have the wish list. We just have to listen and build it.”
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Every record created this way does something quietly radical. It converts a business the system couldn’t see into one it can, one transaction at a time. Or as Bhoola frames the end state: “not a forced shift to formality, but formal-grade visibility showing up as a side effect of doing what they were already doing.”
Rethinking Financial Inclusion, Together.
For years, South Africa’s financial inclusion conversation has centred on one question: how do we get informal businesses into the financial system?
The builders working on this problem flip that question around, and once you hear it flipped, it’s hard to un-hear it.
The better question is how the financial system gets better at recognising businesses that already exist: already trading, already employing people, already surviving one of the toughest operating environments in the world, with or without anyone’s permission.
For Bhoola, that starts with what counts as evidence. “Organisations need to stop treating formal paperwork as the only acceptable evidence of a business being trustworthy,” he argues. “Right now, investment-ready mostly means producing documents that assume you’re already formal, a bank account, invoices, VAT registration, and most viable informal businesses will never produce that. Not because they’re bad risks, but because that paperwork was never built around how they actually operate.” Wherever an institution is making its own judgment call, on a loan, an insurance premium, or supplier terms, he wants it looking at operating history instead. And where the law genuinely requires registration, “the fix isn’t attitude, it’s making formalisation itself faster and cheaper to get through.”
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It’s an argument FINASA has made before. The association’s first Industry Spotlight, Expanding Access: The Next Phase of Digital Finance, arrived at the same place from a different direction, making the case that South Africa’s informal economy isn’t lacking so much as misunderstood, and that the industry’s next decade should be judged by participation rather than by how many new products it launches.
No single product closes the records gap, and no single company should be expected to. It will take record-keeping tools, yes, but also lenders willing to read the new data those tools produce, insurers willing to price on it, regulators willing to recognise it, and an association willing to keep all of those parties at the same table. That’s the work, and it’s the reason this series exists: to look at the structural problems one at a time, through the eyes of the members closest to them.
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Ask Bhoola what success would look like five years from now, and his answer has nothing to do with downloads. “Success for me isn’t a user count,” he says. “It’s whether the businesses using sorted got measurably better access to capital and services than they would have without it. A better-run business creates real opportunity, and that opportunity feeds back into the same communities and markets it came from. That’s what real empowerment looks like.”
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“The township economy is South Africa’s biggest opportunity,” Bhoola says, “because it’s the only market segment where formal financial infrastructure has never actually shown up. Not because the money isn’t there, but because banks, insurers, and credit bureaus decided informal-economy participants were too risky or too costly to serve.”
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Which means the opportunity isn’t waiting to be created. It’s waiting to be seen.
ABOUT SUNESH BHOOLA
Sunesh Bhoola is an experienced South African Chartered Accountant (CA (SA)) and senior corporate executive based in Johannesburg. He has a diverse background spanning financial management, corporate leadership, and technology entrepreneurship across multiple industries like manufacturing logistics, agritech, fintech and soft commodities trading.
ABOUT sorted
sorted is a WhatsApp-based, record-keeping service built specifically for micro-enterprises. It allows small business owners to track their money, record sales and manage expenses entirely via WhatsApp messages, without needing to download an additional app or filling out complex forms.