Dear Partners and Stakeholders,
The SARB has a plan for South African school payments. Forward-thinking principals already do too.
I want to open this article with a pattern, rather than a single incident.
Open any South African news site on any given week, and you'll find a version of the same story. Armed men, sometimes in balaclavas, often at 3 am. A security guard overpowered. An administration block forced open. A safe cut, clean through. Cash, laptops, and equipment taken.
In October 2025 alone, three schools in Limpopo — Mahonisi Primary, Humula High, and Sebora Primary — were targeted within weeks of each other. The case files read like carbon copies of one another. A guard tied up. The principal's office breached. A safe forced open. The same recurring targets, the same recurring losses, the same recurring trauma for the staff who arrive at school the next morning to find it.
In KwaMashu in 2024, six armed men robbed teachers at Mukelani Primary. In Durban earlier this year, teachers at Zamokuhle Primary were forced at gunpoint to transfer their salaries. SAPS and provincial education departments have, with increasing public emphasis, described South African schools as "soft targets" for organised crime.
I'm opening with the pattern, not the individuals, because the pattern is what we need to face. Individual cases are tragedies. The pattern is a system failure. We don't talk about this enough in financial services — we talk about cyber risk, phishing, digital fraud, all the technological bogeymen that make for good conference panels. We talk much less about the very analogue reality that South African schools are still moving meaningful sums of physical cash on a weekly basis, into ordinary safes that turn out to be less of a deterrent than administration assumed.
What the SARB already knows
In 2025, the South African Reserve Bank published its Digital Payments Roadmap. As a CFA charterholder, I read documents like this for fun — and I can tell you this one is quietly radical. It explicitly identifies schools as a priority sector for payment digitisation. Not because schools are large economic actors. They are not. But because the SARB has connected three dots that most school governing bodies have not yet joined.
First, cash on campus is a security liability. Every school that handles physical cash is a small target. Every bursar who takes money to the bank is, in insurance terms, a risk event waiting to happen. The aggregate national exposure here is meaningful, and the SARB has correctly identified it.
Second, cash on campus is a financial-inclusion problem. Transactions in cash leave no record, build no history, and exclude the user from the broader financial system. A R20 tuckshop transaction in cash is invisible. The same transaction digitally is the beginning of a financial identity — data that, over time, helps the next generation access credit, savings products, and economic participation that their parents could not.
Third, and most consequential for our generation: the way children handle money at school shapes how they handle money for the rest of their lives. If their first twelve years of financial behaviour are entirely cash-based, they enter the adult economy at a structural disadvantage compared to peers who grew up digital-first. The SARB sees schools not as a small market, but as a generational lever.
The liability nobody is costing
Most schools I work with have never sat down and properly costed the liability of physical cash on premises. There is the obvious cost — the time it takes to count, reconcile, and deposit. That is the visible iceberg. But the invisible portion is much larger and worth naming line by line.
There is the insurance cost, which most schools underestimate. Cash-on-premises coverage is more expensive than schools assume, and excess clauses on cash-in-transit policies are rarely as generous as administrators believe until they need them. There is the staff cost, in the form of people whose job descriptions quietly include 'safely transport thousands of rand to a bank' — a responsibility that would not be acceptable in any other workplace. There is the reputational cost, in the form of the conversation a principal has to have with a board chair when something goes wrong. And there is the opportunity cost — a bursar who spends her Friday afternoon counting cash is a bursar who is not doing strategic financial planning, vendor negotiation, or budget review.
When you add it all up, 'free' cash collection is one of the most expensive line items in a school's operating model. It just does not appear on the budget that way. This is a familiar pattern from corporate finance: the costs that hurt institutions most are the ones that never make it onto a P&L.
Eliminating cash, securing premises
Sticitt's pitch to principals is uncompromising on this point. Eliminating cash on campus isn't about convenience. It's about safety. When a school transitions to a fully cashless ecosystem — fees, tuckshop, uniform shop, civvies days, fundraising — several things happen simultaneously.
The bursar stops being a cash courier. The admin team stops counting coins. The school gates stop being interesting to anyone watching for an opportunity. The reconciliation that used to take three hours on a Friday takes three minutes on any day. And the conversation with parents shifts from 'did you receive the cash I sent?' to 'I can see the payment cleared, all good'.
This is not speculative. The schools we work with that have committed to going 100% cashless report that their entire risk profile changes — and so does staff retention in administrative roles, because the job becomes one that is actually about finance, instead of one that is about logistics.
Compliance as a foundation, not a burden
One last thing I want to address, because it comes up in every conversation with a new school. Schools are right to ask hard questions about who is handling their money. They are handling other people's money on top of it — parents' fees, in many cases, representing significant portions of household income. The trust threshold should be high.
Sticitt operates as a registered Payment Facilitator (PayFac), Third-Party Payment Provider (TPPP) and a juristic representative of RainFin Proprietary Limited, a licensed FSP. That regulatory status is not a marketing claim. It is an obligation that comes with audits, capital requirements, reporting standards, and operational accountability.
I mention this because a category of 'free' payment apps and informal solutions has started appearing in the South African school market, and I want to be direct: if a payment provider cannot tell you who regulates them, where their funds are held, or what happens to your money if they go bust — that is not a deal. That is a risk you are absorbing without knowing it. Compliance is boring. It is also the foundation on which everything else stands.
Where the industry is going
The SARB's roadmap is going to accelerate. The Reserve Bank does not publish multi-year strategies that it does not intend to act on. Within the next 24 months, I expect direct policy pressure on schools to digitise their payment infrastructure — and I expect the schools that move first will benefit, while those who wait will do it under deadline.
If your school is still in the cash era, the question is not whether to change. It is whether to change on your timeline or someone else's. I would rather make that decision early, with a partner I trust, than late, under regulatory pressure, with whoever is available. If you would like to have that conversation, my team is ready when you are.
When in doubt, paddle out.
Theo Kitshoff
Co-founder & CEO, Sticitt
