👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – When banks go cashless

Happy mid-week.

It’s that time of the year again. Companies are rolling out their audited financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2025, which usually reveal profits, losses, and how companies navigated inflation and changing consumer behaviour in the past year.

Over the next few weeks, banks, telcos, and other organisations will show us what actually worked and what didn’t. We’ll be watching closely. If you bank with them, use their services, invest in them, or just care how the economy is doing, you probably should, too.

Standard Bank, South Africa’s largest bank by assets, and Absa Bank, the third-largest bank, have announced that they are moving away from cash-heavy branches (although for slightly different reasons) toward models built around digital access, advisory services, and fewer physical cash points. This doesn’t mean the lenders will stop dispensing cash at their branches; they are just no longer the centre of branch banking.

Absa says it’s undergoing a strategic evolution. The bank described its earlier model as cash-heavy and noted that customers are increasingly using other channels for transactions. Absa is now shrinking its branch and ATM footprint, and converting many locations into sales-and-service outlets. Absa has already begun reducing its branches around the country from 632 in 2019 to 558 as of June 2025. Its ATM network has also declined to 5,133.

Standard Bank’s logic is more behaviour-driven. The bank says its customers are using less cash in many parts of the country and asking for more advisory services, like loans, investments, and wealth management, rather than withdrawals. Standard Bank’s response is to make some branches cashless, supported by centralised cash hubs, ATMs, and nearby branches that still handle teller services.

What would this mean? The banks have identified consumption patterns of their users and are now tailoring their offerings to meet those needs. The logic makes sense: banking becomes cheaper to run, and customers get less crowded branches. But this transition also tests financial inclusion for people who still rely heavily on cash. For now, the banks insist this is evolution, not exclusion. Whether everyone keeps up is left to be seen.

Onafriq, a pan-African digital payments network, has once again partnered with the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), the intra-African payment initiative, to pilot a new way to send money from Nigerian wallets to Ghana in local currency.

How it works: The transaction moves like a regular transfer between wallets, and allows individuals, merchants, and traders in Nigeria to make payments directly to recipients in Ghana without converting funds into dollars or other foreign currencies. PAPSS handles the behind-the-scenes clearing between central banks, while Onafriq connects mobile money and bank wallets at scale.

It follows a pilot in Ghana: In June 2025, Onafriq and PAPSS launched a pilot program that allowed cross-border payments from Ghana directly to mobile wallets across the continent. This new six-month pilot in Nigeria creates a two-way corridor for faster payments between two of West Africa’s most active trade markets. While transaction data from that pilot hasn’t been made public, its continuation, and now expansion, signal that regulators and partners were comfortable enough with the setup to extend it.

What does this change for intra-African trade? For small traders, this new corridor cuts transaction fees and reduces settlement timelines. By making local-currency trade easier, the pilot quietly advances African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) goals and challenges the dollar’s dominance in intra-African trade.

In South Africa, four financial players: Luno, a UK-based crypto firm; Lesaka Technologies, a Nasdaq-listed fintech; EasyEquities, an investment platform and digital asset manager, Sanlam Specialist Asset Management, have partnered to launch a stablecoin pegged to the rand and built for institutional investors.

Why team up? The new stablecoin, dubbed ZAR Universal (ZARU), is traditional finance meeting blockchain rails. Each partner brings regulatory compliance, asset management, trading access, and distribution. Together, they’re trying to make digital rand payments credible enough for crypto natives.

What ZARU actually is: ZARU is a digital version of the rand that lives on a blockchain. When someone buys one ZARU token, an equivalent amount of real rands is set aside in traditional financial instruments like bank deposits and government bonds. That means ZARU’s value doesn’t swing like Bitcoin. It is designed to always be worth one rand.

A niche sector in a large crypto market: Although the rand-denominated stablecoin space isn’t empty, it is still early-stage compared with dollar-pegged tokens. ZARP, one of the first rand-denominated stablecoins, launched in 2021, while ZAR Supercoin followed in 2025. They operate in a South African crypto market projected to grow to $25 billion by 2033, but one where activity remains heavily concentrated in Bitcoin and major dollar stablecoins. This is the gap ZARU is entering, and its success may depend on whether it can push rand stablecoins beyond trading into real use cases such as payments or settlements.

Written by: Opeyemi Kareem

Edited by: Ganiu Oloruntade