The Reserve Bank flagged “crypto assets and stablecoins” as a new risk to the country’s financial stability, saying their rapid growth and limited regulation could allow risks to build up undetected.
Presenting the Financial Stability Review (FSR) on Tuesday, lead macroprudential specialist Herco Steyn said, “We don’t refer to it as cryptocurrency because ‘currency’ would indicate that we endorse it as legal tender, which we do not.”
The new risk category is called technology-enabled financial innovation, but the Reserve Bank flagged only crypto and stablecoins as a subrisk.
The Bank said it did a stocktake of the current crypto landscape, with the help of trading platforms Luno, VALR and Ovex, showing that the number of South Africans with crypto-trading accounts nearly doubled to 8-million since early 2022, while the value of assets held in custody by Luno, VALR and Ovex rose to more than R25bn by end-2024. Though transactions in rand-pegged stablecoins dropped after a 2023 spike, volumes began rising again in 2025.
Crypto assets are no longer a niche interest confined to tech enthusiasts; they are rapidly becoming a mainstream financial asset. In a major development earlier this month, Discovery Bank announced a partnership with Luno to integrate crypto trading into its mobile banking app.
According to the FSR, crypto assets, due to their digital and therefore borderless nature, “can be used to circumvent the provisions of the exchange control regulations”.
Steyn said in terms of the Reserve Bank’s financial stability monitoring and assessment framework, departure points include regular data submissions and information, “which, due to the lack of a complementary and full regulatory framework, is not possible at the moment”.
He said it’s something the Bank anticipates, that 2026 will yield some regulatory developments, “but if it does not, that will mean that we will not have sufficient … oversight over developments, and then risks can build up undetected”.
He also noted that almost R63bn had been externalised through local crypto platforms since 2019, flows that currently fall outside exchange-control reporting. According to the FSR, the Intergovernmental Fintech Working Group has issued several recommendations to address gaps in the South African exchange control framework exposed by crypto assets.
“The [Reserve Bank] is working with National Treasury to issue a framework for overseeing cross-border transactions relating to crypto assets, while also reviewing and updating the exchange control regulations [of] 1961 to align with developments and to include crypto assets,” the FSR states.
The FSR also listed structural and perpetual risks — slower-moving vulnerabilities that can erode resilience over time. A new structural risk flagged in this edition is the concentration of the South African financial system, particularly within the banking industry. This means that a few large banks dominate the financial system, which can make the system more vulnerable if problems arise in any of those major institutions.
In response to a journalist’s question, Nicola Brink, head of the Bank’s financial stability department, explained that the risk was not newly discovered but newly categorised — part of a broader rethink of how the Bank classifies systemic threats.
Concentration, she said, was a “slow-burning” issue: it may not trigger instability in the short term but can over time “lead to inefficiencies, vulnerabilities and less resilience in the system”.
Despite some recovery in the past two years, critical infrastructure remained weak and “continues to constrain economic growth”. South Africa still produced less electricity, transported fewer goods by rail and handled less cargo at its ports than in 2019 — keeping this risk on the Bank’s radar.
The impact of climate change also remains a structural concern. The Reserve Bank warned that extreme weather events could damage assets, disrupt insurance portfolios and accelerate transition risks for carbon intensive industries. Uncertainty over the global commitment to sustained climate action added to the difficulty of pricing these risks and protecting financial stability.
All in all, the Reserve Bank said South Africa’s overall financial stability outlook had improved since June, supported by a stronger fiscal position, the removal of the country from the Financial Action Task Force greylist, the first sovereign credit rating upgrade in two decades, and the formal adoption of a lower inflation target.
These developments, with low inflation, a firmer rand and buoyant equity markets, had helped ease domestic financial conditions and bolster resilience across the banking system, the Bank said.
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