BRICS wants to link central bank digital currencies. South Africa sees no immediate need for one.
India's central bank governor says BRICS members are discussing links between fast payment systems and central bank digital currencies. South Africa concluded in November 2025 that there is no compelling immediate need for a retail digital rand. Its route into any BRICS rail runs through PayShap and regional corridors rather. . .
India's central bank governor says BRICS members are discussing links between fast payment systems and central bank digital currencies. South Africa concluded in November 2025 that there is no compelling immediate need for a retail digital rand. Its route into any BRICS rail runs through PayShap and regional corridors rather than a digital currency. BRICS Payment Links and Africa’s Competing RailsReserve Bank of India governor Sanjay Malhotra told a banking conference in Mumbai on August 11 that BRICS members are examining ways to connect their fast payment systems and central bank digital currencies. He said several options were on the table and that the work remained at the discussion stage. India holds the BRICS presidency in 2026, and the RBI has recommended that CBDC interoperability be included on the agenda of the 2026 BRICS summit. For African exporters and remittance providers, the promise is real. A payment from Johannesburg to Mumbai or São Paulo can still travel through correspondent-banking chains that add time and cost at successive stages, while domestic instant-payment systems move money in seconds. Cutting that chain could lower the cost of trading with major BRICS markets. There is a problem with the plan’s shape, and it is located in Pretoria. The member taking a different routeIn November 2025, the South African Reserve Bank published a position paper concluding that while a retail central bank digital currency is technically feasible, its analysis did not reveal a compelling immediate need to issue one. The bank said its priority was modernizing the existing payment ecosystem and expanding participation in the national payment system, while its next phase of research would focus more heavily on wholesale applications. Deputy governor Rashad Cassim restated that position publicly in June 2026. That leaves South Africa as the BRICS founding member with perhaps the clearest official case against issuing a retail CBDC in the near term. It has not ruled one out permanently, but it is pursuing a different sequence from countries placing retail or general-purpose digital currencies closer to the centre of their payments strategy. If a future BRICS rail is built around CBDCs, Pretoria could participate through a wholesale model that remains exploratory and has not been adopted for production, through links between conventional fast-payment systems, or through some hybrid arrangement. Governor Lesetja Kganyago has consistently argued that connecting national payment systems is more practical than creating a common BRICS currency. That position now looks less like outright resistance than a potential interoperability constraint. South Africa is not starting from nothing. PayShap, the domestic instant-payment service launched in 2023, is being expanded as part of the central bank’s modernization programme. A cross-border corridor between South Africa and Zambia is already live through the regional TCIB scheme, enabling near-immediate payments, with further Southern African links planned. These are the assets South Africa would bring to any BRICS conversation: conventional payment infrastructure rather than a retail digital-currency system. The continental question nobody is askingThe more consequential competition for African business is not necessarily between BRICS and the dollar. It is between the payment rails now being built on the continent itself. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, launched in 2022 by Afreximbank and the AfCFTA Secretariat, allows payments between participating markets to be initiated and received in local currencies rather than routinely routed through correspondent banks in New York or London. Counts of PAPSS’s reach vary because sources do not always measure the same thing. An Atlantic Council assessment in May 2026 described the system as operational in fifteen countries, while Afreximbank said in July that PAPSS connected twenty-eight countries, more than 190 banks and fintechs and sixteen switches. Those figures may refer to different levels of participation, connectivity and operational access, so the operator’s own definitions should be used when comparing coverage. South Africa’s domestic banking market has so far remained outside PAPSS direct participation. A 2025 assessment by the Trade Law Centre, TRALAC, noted the absence of directly participating banks in two of the continent’s largest intra-African trading economies, South Africa and Egypt, although South African banking groups such as Absa and Standard Bank participate through operations in other African markets. The central bank’s own Vision 2030+ consultation paper, published in February 2026, acknowledged that regional initiatives of this kind have so far struggled to gain significant traction. The remaining obstacles are not simply about messaging standards. South Africa’s SAMOS settlement system migrated to ISO 20022 in 2022, TCIB also uses ISO 20022, and PAPSS is built around the same messaging family. That removes one layer of technical incompatibility but does not make the systems interoperable by default. Settlement models, foreign-exchange arrangements, participation rules, compliance requirements, APIs, governance and regulatory alignment still determine whether one rail can connect cleanly to another. None of this makes the BRICS discussion irrelevant to Africa. It changes who it is relevant to. On present evidence, an Ivorian or Kenyan exporter is more likely to encounter local-currency settlement through African payment infrastructure before any future BRICS mechanism reaches them, while a South African corporate treasurer is more likely to encounter it through PayShap, TCIB and other regional corridors. The summit will produce a communiqué. The plumbing will decide what it is worth. Idris Linge