JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, August 28, 2025/APO Group: Many South Africans are living through challenging times where the cost of living is rising faster than salaries, pushing several households to rely on credit to meet their financial needs. According to Finmark Trust, 75 percent of households borrowed in 2024 by resorting to credit for basic essentials, such as food, which puts low-income earners at risk by turning to costlier micro lenders and exploitative loan sharks.
In such difficult times, a new concept, earned wage access (EWA), has emerged, aiming to provide a strong alternative where digital technologies are making it simple for employers to offer this service. The Head of Growth at TymeBank ZA, Jarred Deacon puts into context, “Corporates spend a lot of their time managing resources, so our teams are inundated with requests from either lending or trying to understand how to manage people’s cash flow. We have many examples where people come through and see how they can access some portion of their money if they have a medical emergency or if they have some type of financial distress. They try their best to really fix that issue,” says Jarred Deacon, Head of Growth at TymeBank ZA.”
TymeBank ZA has partnered with Deel Local Payroll to provide early wage access (EWA), posing as a financial empowerment service for businesses, offering a financial lifeline to struggling employees. EWA is not a standard credit service offering loans to individuals. The system works in such a way that an employee withdraws a chunk of wages they’ve earned in a particular month and paid to a predesignated account or provides it as a voucher through retailers such as Boxer stores.
The service first appeared in the early 2010s in the United States, where an excess of 7 million US workers used EWA in 2022 (for $22 billion) in transactions, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report. EWA is seen as very attractive, with a majority of employees expecting such payment flexibility from their employers. Today, major corporations, including Walmart and McDonald’s, offer EWA.
The service is growing in South Africa, where TymeBank and Paymenow are leading the trend in collaboration with Deel Local Payroll’s PaySpace platform.
“EWA is a modern fintech product. It uses automation and API integration to streamline the underlying processes, making access easy while taking care of regulatory requirements. By using a cloud-native payroll platform such as ours, financial institutions extend EWA services to businesses and their employees. It’s fast, safe, and keeps overheads low,” says Warren van Wyk, Director at Deel Local Payroll.
According to Paymenow, the average employee draws around 10 percent of their monthly wages ahead of paydays. Employers are also able to set a cap on withdrawals, typically between 25 percent and 30 percent.
EWA avoids lending conditions where fees and repayments can dramatically exceed the loaned amounts. The service also improves productivity and employee well-being, since many employees say that financial stress occupies their minds while working, and some spend several work hours focusing on personal finance issues.
