Obligation briefs · 16 SADC jurisdictions
Tell me the market, the activity, and roughly what you move a month.
You get three answers back, for that activity and that volume, as a document your compliance function can act on and your lawyer can check line by line. Not a market view — your situation.
What obliges you
The licence, registration and reporting obligations on both legs: who administers each, under which instrument, and which attach to your activity and volume rather than to the category. Each one cited to the instrument and dated.
Who will take you
Not who claims to serve the market — who actually onboarded an entity like yours, and what each one demanded before it would say yes or no.
What changed
A draft finalised, a threshold moved, an exemption withdrawn. A requirement that was sound advice last year and is not now is the one that gets a business fined.
Why this cannot be looked up
The constraint is not that information is scarce. It is that standing cannot be acquired at distance.
A German or Delaware entity can read every directive we can read and still not know which regulator it must deal with, what compliance will actually be demanded of it, or whether anyone will onboard it at all. It cannot be the applicant, cannot hold the account, and cannot learn by being refused.
So the customer is not a business short of analysis. It is a business short of presence — and therefore unable to generate this evidence at any budget.
10 providers have been approached by a real South African company holding no financial services licence, and every answer recorded. Not one declined because the corridor was unavailable. Every refusal was a threshold. What the register holds.
What this is not
It is not a way to enter a market faster, and it is not a legal opinion. For a business standing on ground it has not tested, speed is the failure mode — the account that closes after go-live, the exemption that did not cover your activity, the licence category that turned out to be domestic only. None of those is fixed by being faster.
No promise to accelerate an entry. The promise is that it holds.
Which is why the gaps are published as prominently as the findings. You cannot adapt to a fact you do not know is missing, and you cannot adapt to a stale one at all — 71 instruments across the region are not yet named and sourced, and they are listed as such rather than guessed. What changed, and when.
What arrives
A business already moving money on a corridor that wants to know whether it is on the right route. One corridor, one situation, delivered as a document.
- Named providers, not anonymised
- Who onboards a company like yours, on what grounds, with the dates
- All-in cost against mid-market on the routes we have measured
- What settlement actually demanded of us on each
- Everything we do not yet hold, listed
Not for. Anyone wanting a recommendation. We publish what we measured; the decision stays yours.
There is nothing to buy yet. The register is open while the first corridors are filled in, because a reader who can check the work is worth more right now than a fee.
Disclosure
The person who writes this register also operates a cross-border payments business. You should know that before you read anything here.
It is the reason the register can say what it says: the access outcomes come from real applications made by a real operating company, not from an analyst reading press releases. It is also an obvious conflict, so it is handled explicitly — that business is not assessed here, appears in no ranking, and is never the answer to a question the register asks.
Start with the corridor you are already worried about.
No price list and nothing to buy yet. Tell me the corridor, roughly what you move a month and what you are deciding, and you get what the register holds on it — gaps included — and a conversation about the part it does not.
Prefer to look first? A redacted assessment shows the document this produces, and the workflow shows what the register already holds for your market.