IN SHORT: Cape Town’s Cape Organisation for the Democratic Taxi Association is launching a cashless payment system across all its taxi ranks from June 1, 2026, replacing cash with card payments and a SAPAY smartphone app. Passengers will load money onto prepaid cards at taxi ranks or tap smartphones on payment stickers inside taxis. Each vehicle will carry four payment stickers to prevent queuing, plus cameras and scanning devices. The initiative covers the daily transport of millions of Cape Town commuters who use the country’s largest informal transport network.
Cape Town’s taxi industry is going cashless from June 1, bringing South Africa’s most widely used form of daily transport into the digital payments era and delivering one of the most consequential financial inclusion events of the year: 15 million South Africans rely on minibus taxis every day, and the digitalisation of that cash flow is a transformative moment for both transport safety and formal financial sector inclusion.
Codeta chairman Nceba Enge made the announcement this week, confirming a June 1 launch date for the SAPAY-powered system that will operate across Codeta’s Cape Town rank network. Enge described the system plainly: “We are changing how we do things.”
- The mechanics are straightforward for commuters. Those without smartphones can purchase prepaid cards at taxi ranks and load money onto them, tapping the card inside the taxi to pay. Smartphone users download the SAPAY app and tap their phone on one of four payment stickers in each taxi. The four-sticker design is deliberate: it prevents the single-point bottleneck that has slowed previous digital payment pilots in informal transport, where all passengers queuing to tap a single device at the front of the vehicle creates delays that drivers and commuters both resist.
- The safety argument is the primary driver cited by Codeta’s leadership. Taxi drivers carrying significant cash are a known robbery target in South Africa’s urban transport corridors. A cashless system removes the cash from the vehicle, eliminating the primary incentive for robbery. Cameras and scanning devices fitted to each taxi add a further deterrent layer. Enge acknowledged that the early rollout will have problems but committed to fixing them progressively.
- The financial inclusion dimension is less discussed but structurally more significant. South Africa’s minibus taxi industry moves approximately R60 billion per year in informal cash transactions. None of that cash is banked in the conventional sense: it flows through drivers, rank marshals, taxi associations and owners in an entirely informal circuit that is invisible to the financial system. Digitalising even a portion of those transactions creates formal financial records for drivers and owners, opening access to banking products, insurance, credit and investment that the informal cash economy makes structurally inaccessible.
- Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi has separately called for the national taxi industry to fully transition to cashless payments by end-2026. The Eastern Cape SANTACO has been piloting a parallel system. Multiple fintech companies including Waxd Solutions, Loop and SAPAY are competing for what is effectively the largest informal financial inclusion market in South Africa. The Cape Town Codeta launch is the largest single operator deployment of a cashless taxi system to date.
- For the broader African fintech sector, the Cape Town launch is a proof-of-concept moment. Informal transport is the dominant daily economic transaction for hundreds of millions of Africans from Lagos to Nairobi to Johannesburg. The same informal cash economy that characterises South Africa’s taxi industry exists across the continent’s matatu, trotro, danfo and boda-boda sectors. A cashless system that succeeds at scale in Cape Town creates a replicable model for the largest fintech opportunity in African urban transport.
The SAPAY system allows taxi owners to track income in real time, generating the financial history that could eventually unlock access to commercial loans for fleet expansion, maintenance financing and insurance products. The transition from cash to digital is not just about payment convenience. It is about bringing an entire informal sector economy into the measurable, bankable, insurable formal economy.
The Bigger Picture: Fifteen million South Africans take a minibus taxi every day. Until June 1, every single fare they pay is untraceable cash. That is not a small thing. It is the largest informal financial transaction network in the country, operating entirely outside the formal economy in a way that leaves drivers exposed to robbery, owners unable to track income, and commuters unable to prove they travel. The Codeta cashless launch is not a fintech story. It is a financial inclusion story at the scale that actually moves the needle on South Africa’s formal economy integration of its most economically vulnerable workers and commuters.
Source: AllAfrica via Scrolla.Africa / Scrolla.Africa, May 11, 2026
