South Africans could one day use the digital ID home affairs is building to “seed” a payment credential under the Reserve Bank’s PEMKey programme, sparing them a separate onboarding process, according to DIDx founder Lohan Spies.
PEMKey, one of the programmes under the Reserve Bank’s Payments Ecosystem Modernisation (PEM) programme, is establishing what the central bank calls a payment credential ecosystem, which “will enable secure, reusable and trusted digital credentials for use across the payments ecosystem”.
Home affairs minister Leon Schreiber demonstrated the department’s digital ID on his phone in the MyMzansi app on 1 October. Treasury has set aside R150-million for the app, and the South African Revenue Service (Sars) plans to give every taxpayer a digital identity. TechCentral asked DIDx, a South African digital identity company, how these would fit together.
Spies and chief operating officer Gideon Lombard spoke as digital identity specialists and stressed that they could not speak on behalf of the Reserve Bank. DIDx is involved in various government-led digital identity initiatives, Lombard said, and does work for Interfront, the wholly owned Sars IT subsidiary, under a publicly awarded tender.
DIDx builds digital identity and credential technology of the kind PEMKey will rely on, so it has a commercial interest in how the programme is designed. The Reserve Bank has not published a list of participants in the PEMKey sandbox.
‘Golden source of truth’
As the civil registry holding citizens’ identity records and fingerprints, home affairs is “the fundamental golden source of truth”, Spies said, and MyMzansi’s first purpose is “person to government and government to person” services.
He believes a MyMzansi credential could then be presented to PEMKey. “Effectively, what you do is you seed your PEMKey,” he said. Once it is verified, the user can “skip that whole onboarding process because home affairs already did the hard work to prove that it’s really me”.
The Reserve Bank has not said whether MyMzansi credentials will be accepted. Its PEMKey FAQ page says the ecosystem “builds upon trust already established by foundational credentials and trusted authorities”. Its September industry dialogue presentation describes an accredited issuer of a “personal payment credential” that confirms identity “through approved verification, such as home affairs source data”. The presentation does not mention MyMzansi.
In time, Spies expects PEMKey to become “the enabler on the foundation layer for government-related payments”, whether citizens are paying the state or being paid by it.
Home affairs and Sars signed a digital pact in April 2025, and the digital ID’s core infrastructure will be built in Sars’s hosting environment, with an operational digital ID targeted for 2027/2028. Home affairs’ plan assumes the Reserve Bank, the banks and telecoms operators will collaborate on integration.
Eighteen months ago, Lombard said, there was “a bit of a question mark” over “who’s going to win this identity race between all of these departments”. Now home affairs, Sars and others are “starting to leverage one another”, he said.
“I need an identity credential to do something with my tax relationship. That might include a credential from home affairs and a credential from Sars,” he said. “It’s not a zero-sum game between them anymore.”
Many providers
Asked whether PEMKey would have one provider or many, Spies said: “My view is that the PEMKey programme, in the long run, is not meant or designed to be controlled by any entity.” Technology, he said, “can come from anywhere as long as it’s conformant to PEMKey standards”.
The Reserve Bank’s presentation says its PEMKey sandbox is “open to all potential participants”, but that participation is “subject to Reserve Bank approval and ongoing oversight” and “does not imply production approval, accreditation or future participation rights”.
Spies said PEMKey is “not intended to be a big brother surveillance capability”. The aim, he said, is to prove that payer and payee have passed know-your-customer checks without broadcasting who paid whom, while banks could still identify their clients if something went wrong.
The Reserve Bank’s FAQ says credentials “are not stored in a central repository” and that the ecosystem “is not designed to track spending behaviour, monitor how people use their money or build behavioural profiles”.
Spies thinks home affairs’ timeline is technically realistic. “It will be there. It will be functional,” he said. But he questioned whether it would be ready for a full national roll-out, suggesting it could first go to a subset of users, and Lombard expects a phased roll-out. “The difficult thing here is governance and trust,” Spies said. “What happens if stuff goes wrong? How do you revoke a credential?”
Adoption will depend on what people can do with it, such as claiming a Sassa grant or paying taxes “very efficiently from your bed”, he said. “To drive the scale and adoption, you need the e-services.” – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
