South Africans wagered R1.5 trillion on gambling in the 2024/25 financial year. If 40% of working adults gamble regularly and there are approximately 16 million employed South Africans, what's the average annual gambling spend per regular gambler?

LENDING

South Africa's online retail market is racing toward R150 billion and 12% of total retail by 2027, but the booming e-commerce sector is outpacing oversight with rising buy-now-pay-later usage, limited credit visibility, and unregulated online gambling creating systemic financial risks.

Jason Sive, CEO of Mobicred, warns lenders have no visibility of customers' full credit obligations when BNPL providers don't report to credit bureaux.

South Africans spent R1.5 trillion on gambling in 2024/25, up R400 billion from the previous year, with R1.1 trillion wagered on betting alone according to the National Gambling Board.

Old Mutual Corporate data reveals 40% of working South Africans gamble frequently to cover monthly shortfalls and supplement income.

The global BNPL market hit $560 billion in 2025 transaction value, driven by interest-free instalments and low-friction digital access to credit.

When 40% of working adults gamble regularly and BNPL platforms don't report to credit bureaux, you create a blind spot where consumers layer debt obligations that individual lenders can't see. Mobicred's Sive says "we know how many of our customers are gambling and gaming monthly, and most of the time, those are the customers who cannot afford to be."

Treasury's proposed 20% tax on gross gambling revenue, layered on top of 6-9% provincial taxes, could push combined rates to 26-29% and drive players to offshore platforms.

The regulatory gap: BNPL providers operate outside traditional credit regulations while online gambling remains illegal except for licensed operators, creating a compliance vacuum where the most vulnerable consumers accumulate invisible debt to fund betting habits.

REMITTANCES

Capitec scaled its cross-border remittance offering from seven markets at launch to 26 countries in under a year, extending service to Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the UK while business banking customers surged 71% to 456,000.

The expansion targets immigrant communities running small businesses in South Africa's township economy, where Bangladeshi and Pakistani shop owners operate an estimated 55,000 to 300,000 establishments including spazas and cellphone stores.

BusinessDay reports Capitec's business banking breakdown at year-end showed 78,000 entrepreneurs, 112,000 merchants, and 260,000 small businesses.

Gerrie Fourie, Capitec's CEO, told shareholders the bank now has extensive experience in the cross-border remittance space with flows concentrated to Zimbabwe, Malawi, Lesotho, and Botswana, but the Pakistan and Bangladesh corridors unlock massive immigrant business owner populations sending money home monthly.

Skills Portal notes that while formal data on the number of Pakistani and Bangladeshi-owned shops is limited, estimates range from 55,000 to as high as 300,000 spaza shops and cellphone stores run by these communities across South African townships. No one can deny that that's a massive segment, but can that potential be profitably converted? Capitec's push into this segment likely indicates that this segment is already active in Capitec's networks and now they're building digital value-additive features around them.

Capitec's hitting the remittance market at the infrastructure layer, not the retail layer. While Western Union and MoneyGram fight over airport kiosks and CBD branches, Capitec's embedding remittances into the same digital banking app that 1.5 million South Africans already use for free on-net calls and business banking.

The 71% growth in business banking customers could signal they're winning the trust of exactly the demographic that sends money home monthly: immigrant entrepreneurs running cash businesses in townships. When you combine free banking, free mobile calls, and cross-border remittances in one app used by the shop owner who's already your customer, you eliminate the need to walk to a separate remittance agent and pay Western Union's markup.

The Pakistan and Bangladesh corridors aren't just geographic expansion, but a direct attack on the informal remittance networks and hawala systems that move billions annually outside formal banking channels. If Capitec can convert even 10% of that informal flow to its platform, it owns the township banking relationship from salary deposit to international money transfer to mobile airtime, locking out competitors who still think "cross-border payments" means serving corporates and expats, not the Bangladeshi shop owner in Soweto sending R5,000 home every month. Now the question becomes how retained will this user be? Are these integrated features enough to retain and woo this segment into the larger ecosystem?

CROSS-BORDER PAYMENTS

Ecobank and Bank of China are in advanced talks to launch a direct yuan settlement system by December 2026, allowing African businesses to pay Chinese suppliers in renminbi without converting through US dollars first.

The system targets the $348 billion annual trade volume between China and Africa, which grew 26% in Chinese exports to Africa in 2025, and aims to eliminate the double conversion fees and exchange rate risk built into current dollar-intermediated payment flows.

Nigeria Startup Act reports the initiative builds on existing currency swap agreements between African central banks and the People's Bank of China, with at least ten African nations now maintaining yuan swap lines.

Togo First notes the system will integrate with China's Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), which already handles yuan transactions for 1,500 financial institutions across 110 countries. Fun fact - Standard Bank became the first African bank authorised as a CIPS direct participant in 2023, establishing the technical precedent Ecobank will follow.

The timing is what really matters: China exported $189 billion worth of goods to Africa in 2025, up 26% year-over-year, while African exports to China totalled $159 billion, creating a trade relationship where the majority of payments currently flow through dollar correspondent banks despite neither party primarily using dollars domestically. Read that again.

When African importers pay Chinese suppliers today, they convert local currency to dollars, send dollars through correspondent banks, then the Chinese supplier converts dollars to yuan, paying foreign exchange spreads and banking fees twice on a single transaction.

Ecobank's building the yuan rails because the current system only makes sense if you're a dollar correspondent bank collecting fees on both conversions. Direct yuan settlement matters because it's infrastructure, not a product. Once the pipes are laid, every African business importing from China can route payments through Ecobank's platform, and every competitor bank either builds their own expensive yuan infrastructure or becomes an Ecobank referral partner.

The risk: China's renminbi isn't freely convertible, meaning this only works if Chinese regulators keep expanding yuan internationalisation and African central banks maintain currency swap facilities. In my view, this is long overdue: with $348 billion in annual trade volume and 26% export growth, neither China nor African importers really want to keep enriching Western correspondent banks on transactions that never touch New York. That means the banks that win cross-border payments in the next decade won't be the ones with the most nostro accounts in New York, but the ones with direct clearing relationships in Beijing, and Ecobank's about to have one. Time to polish up your Mandarin.

South Africa

International

Answer: B) R234,375