From transacting to planning: South Africa's next frontier of financial inclusion

The harder, more meaningful work around longer-term financial planning that protects families across generations, is where the next level of inclusion work lies.

Language, perhaps more than wealth, is an important lever to further this objective.

South Africa has built one of the most banked populations on the continent: by 2023, 98% of adults were formally included, according to FinMark Trust's FinScope Consumer Survey. But this achievement reflects access to accounts and payments. It does not offer an indicator of progress on inclusion in terms of longer-term financial planning.

After stripping away funeral cover, only 19% of South Africans hold any insurance with life cover specifically sitting around 10%. Nearly 30 million economically active adult South Africans (about 86%, per FinScope's definition) have no retirement plan at all. This implies that beyond the immediate cost of death, planning for what happens next remains underdeveloped for the majority of South Africans (insurance breakdown: FSCA Financial Sector Outlook Study, 2022; retirement coverage: FinScope 2023).

Financial planning is furthermore often equated with retirement and insurance products. However, the most consequential planning tool for any household — the will — is the one most often overlooked. According to Allan Gray's analysis of High Court statistics, as much as 85% of South Africans die without a will, and the state's Guardian's Fund holds over R20 billion on behalf of minor beneficiaries and untraced heirs.

The will, considered as a cornerstone of financial planning, is key to unlocking financial inclusion beyond transactional dimensions.

When it comes to will creation, many South Africans have traditionally faced not only emotional, but structural barriers to accessing this category. Will creation has historically been a face-to-face transaction with a legal professional, costing time and money. It has been wrapped in the assumption that creating a will is only for those with wealth to leave behind, highlighting the education gap. Importantly, it has often been offered predominantly in English.,

A language which, according to Census 2022, is held as home language by only 8.7% of South Africans.

The South Africans least likely to have a will are the same group least likely to read English at home — and, increasingly, those carrying the most on a single income. Old Mutual's Savings & Investment Monitor 2023 recorded that more than four in ten working South Africans now support both children and older relatives. For these households, the absence of a will shapes how well dependants on either side will weather the loss of the breadwinner.

The reasons people cite for not having a will — a perception of not having enough wealth to warrant one, and active avoidance of thinking about final wishes — may be signals of lack of comprehension and confidence, not legal objections.

A will is not a contract. It is the last document a person speaks through — the testator's voice to the people who outlive them. For a credit agreement, language access is about whether the borrower understood the terms before signing. For a will, it is about whether a family, at the moment they most need clarity, receives that voice in the language they think and grieve in. Of every document a person signs, the will is the one where home language arguably carries the most weight.

The conditions for closing parts of this gap have shifted significantly in the past decade. Translation technology and maturing human-supported digital channels make it possible to deliver legally sound, multilingual documents at scale.

Old Mutual Will is an example: as a free, digital will-creation service open to all South Africans, it is also supported by financial advisers and call-centre agents for customers who prefer human support. Old Mutual reports that nearly half of call-centre-facilitated wills are now completed in the customer's home language — a signal that language preference is shaping how customers complete the process. The journey on screen may be in English, but for many South Africans the conversation that gets them through to completion is not.

As among the first end-to-end digital will-creation services in South Africa, Old Mutual Will has now extended its service to allow customers to download the completed will in multiple South African languages. Customers can now download their will in five South African languages — English, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans and Sepedi — covering 70% of the population by home language (Census 2022). The home language version sits side-by-side with the English version, which serves as the operative version used at the Master's Office. It is a deliberate step: the language that people use to make sense of the world, applied to the document that speaks for them after they're gone.

The multilingual will download capability is only one of several levers needed to increase access to estate planning, but it does put a concrete tool in the hands of South Africans to engage with longer term financial planning on their terms.