AS South Africa observes National Savings Month this July, a stark reality is coming into focus: Financial inclusion must evolve beyond simply opening bank accounts.
True financial security requires treating financial literacy as critical national infrastructure, according to Yinka Yomi-Tokosi, Managing Executive: Strategy & Investments at Access Bank South Africa.
With households facing severe cost-of-living pressures, Yomi-Tokosi argues that access to financial systems only becomes meaningful when consumers understand how to use those systems safely, confidently, and to their own benefit.
“A customer can have a bank account and still feel excluded from the financial system,” says Yomi-Tokosi. “They may not understand why fees were charged, how interest accumulates, what a debit order means, why a credit score matters, or how to identify fraud. The product may be there, but confidence is missing.”
This call to elevate financial education arrives at a critical juncture of regulatory and market shifts in South Africa, underscored by three alarming trends. First, severe debt pressures: last year’s FinMark Trust FinScope findings reported that 75% of South African adults who borrowed used credit just to cover everyday essentials like food, with an estimated 12 million adults classified as over-indebted.
Second, escalating digital fraud: SABRIC statistics show that digital banking fraud skyrocketed from 31 612 incidents in 2023 to 64 000 in 2024, with losses exceeding R1.4 billion. Critically, SABRIC noted that these crimes are driven by social engineering, manipulating human behaviour, rather than technical breaches of bank security.
Third, new policy directions: The National Treasury’s draft National Consumer Financial Education Policy, released for consultation in 2026, explicitly recognises financial education as a core pillar for improving financial wellbeing and building digital trust.
Yomi-Tokosi stresses that banks must move away from treating financial literacy as a “once-a-year campaign or a brochure handed out in a branch”. When pressed on what concrete government actions, funding models, and accountability mechanisms would make financial literacy function as national infrastructure rather than an occasional programme, he is unequivocal.
“Treating financial literacy as infrastructure requires a national delivery system with sustained coordination, funding, and measurement,” Yomi-Tokosi explains. He outlines a clear roadmap: National Treasury should finalise an implementation plan with named owners, deadlines, priority audiences, and a public annual scorecard.
Funding, he proposes, can combine the Financial Sector Code’s existing requirement for financial institutions to allocate 0.4% of net profit after tax with public investment in schools, community delivery, and independent evaluation.
The National Consumer Financial Education Committee should coordinate standards and reduce duplication. Accountability must measure whether people understand costs and risks, seek help earlier when debt pressure rises, use recourse channels, and transact more safely. Crucially, results should be published by audience, language, income level, and delivery channel so weak performance is visible and can be corrected.
Regarding the National Treasury’s draft policy, Yomi-Tokosi supports its focus on financially capable households, MSMEs, digital literacy, stakeholder coordination, and stronger monitoring and evaluation.
However, he argues the implementation layer needs strengthening, proposing three practical changes: A funded plan assigning delivery owners and deadlines; minimum national standards for plain language, multilingual content, disability access, and low-data or offline delivery; and a shared outcomes framework allowing programmes to be compared using comprehension and behaviour measures alongside reach.
Complaints, fraud, arrears, and ombud data should guide priorities by showing where consumers encounter difficulty in real customer journeys.
To make this a reality, Yomi-Tokosi believes regulators must impose minimum measurable obligations on banks to embed financial education into everyday customer journeys.
This includes onboarding, credit applications, high-risk transactions, arrears, and complaints. The information must be plain, timely, multilingual, and relevant to the decision being made.
Banks should report reach alongside outcomes such as customer comprehension; use of support or recourse; repeat fraud; avoidable payment disputes; earlier engagement after missed repayments; and harmful borrowing patterns.
These results must be segmented by income, age, location, disability, and digital access, shifting the focus toward consistent customer outcomes across channels and away from counting brochures, messages, or training sessions as proof of impact.
When asked about real-world educational alerts or transaction-level interventions Access Bank has implemented to reduce fraud and predatory lending; Yomi-Tokosi points to concrete tools already in place. DebiCheck requires customers to authenticate new debit-order mandates electronically, helping prevent unauthorised collections.
Access Bank More uses biometric authentication for in-app authorisations and allows customers to block a lost or stolen card directly. On lending, Access Bank’s credit process includes affordability assessments and prescribed disclosures before credit is granted.
“We do not have verified early-result figures to share publicly, and I would avoid attaching an untested claim of success to these interventions,” he notes candidly. “The next opportunity lies in stronger contextual prompts before customers accept credit or complete unusually risky transactions.”
Designing warnings that reduce social-engineering fraud without creating alert fatigue is a delicate balance. Yomi-Tokosi asserts that warnings work best when they reflect the specific risk facing the customer at that moment. A generic message shown repeatedly becomes background noise.
Banks should reserve stronger interruptions for unusual beneficiaries, rapid changes in transaction behaviour, new devices, high-value payments, or patterns associated with scams. The warning must explain the specific risk, give the customer a clear action to take, and provide an immediate route to verify or report.
On the contentious issue of liability when targeted manipulation succeeds, Yomi-Tokosi argues it should follow the facts and the controls available to each party. Banks remain responsible for secure systems, proportionate detection, and clear communication.
Telecoms and digital platforms also carry responsibilities. While customers should protect their credentials, targeted manipulation should never automatically imply that the customer alone is at fault.
Financial literacy improves judgement when making consumer choices, but Yomi-Tokosi is careful to note its limits. Unaffordable products, weak affordability assessments, aggressive sales practices, and inadequate enforcement require stronger market interventions.
Responsible credit assessment, product governance, restrictions where harm is foreseeable, accessible debt support, and effective supervision must operate alongside education.
To avoid widening inequality, interventions must reach people through branches, community organisations, radio, USSD, WhatsApp, and zero-rated digital services. Content should be multilingual and designed for different levels of literacy, digital confidence, and disability.
Success must be measured separately for vulnerable groups. “An intervention that improves outcomes mainly for digitally confident, higher-income customers has not solved the national problem,” he warns.
Looking forward, Yomi-Tokosi issues three top time-bound asks. Within 12 months, National Treasury should publish a funded implementation plan with national targets and a public outcomes dashboard.
The Prudential Authority, working with the FSCA, should require bank boards to treat social-engineering exposure, fraud response, and digital trust as governance and operational-risk priorities. Within six months, the banking sector should adopt common standards for risk-based warnings, rapid account protection, and fraud reporting.
If he could prioritise a single fundable initiative, it would be a national, zero-rated “Pause, Verify, Report” service. Working through apps, USSD, WhatsApp, call centres, and community channels, it would give consumers a trusted way to verify a message or payment request and report suspected fraud quickly.
Ultimately, the vision is clear. “Digital trust is not built through technology alone,” Yomi-Tokosi adds. “It also depends on whether people understand the risks that surround the technology. Financial literacy is not a soft add-on to inclusion. It is what helps people turn access into control.”