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This post is for those undertaking an overland trip in Africa that are not of African nationality.  Whether you plan to rent or buy a vehicle locally, or to ship one to the continent, you’ll need to figure out how to handle money and transactions, both before you arrive and while on the road.  Below is what we’ve figured out and what has worked for us. My notes will be most helpful for those from the USA, but there may be some useful tips for others as well.

Credit Cards

By far the easiest way to handle payments is a credit card, but this does come with some pretty significant caveats.  First off, and this is imperative, you need a card that has no foreign transaction fees.  

There are numerous no foreign transaction fee cards available on the market, we use a Chase travel card. Some of the Chase cards have high annual fees, but these are offset if you take advantages of the benefits those cards offer. This is something of a game for banks, some customers getting more than the annual fee value from their cards, and, the bank hopes, some customers not getting the full value, and thus profit for the bank. Make sure you are in the former category and not the latter.

Many expenses on the road qualify as “travel” expenses, and thus the Chase cards pay 2 or 3 points to the dollar spent on lots of things, which can be a way to pay for plane tickets or just claim those points as cash back. The world of gaming cards for rewards is deep (learn more here) and fraught with peril for those that aren’t both organized and patient. If that is not you then look for a card with no foreign transaction fees that pays 1-2% cash back. I hope it goes without saying, but never carry a balance on your credit card, that will steal valuable dollars away from your travel purse and totally negate any benefit you’re getting from the credit card perks.

Credit cards are widely accepted in South Africa, but less and less accepted the further north you go, though that is changing rapidly. 

Credit card fraud is high, and you’ll notice that no one in Africa will ever take your card out of your sight, they’ll bring the machine to you. In the US we are comfortable with, for example, servers at a restaurant taking our card away to be run at a central machine, but this is highly unusual in Africa.  If someone takes your card from your sight you should be on high alert that something is up.

Funny enough, I was in Kasane, Botswana when I got a fraud alert from Chase on my phone, but the fraud was being conducted in Ohio. I had to explain to Chase that I wasn’t in Ohio, but Botswana, and no, that wasn’t near Ohio. They cancelled the card. So, I say fraud is common in Africa, but it’s never been a problem for us. This does bring up the importance of having more than one card.  Our experience is that Visa is widely accepted, and Mastercard slightly less so.  We each have one of each kind of card (Visa or Mastercard) to cover our bases of what is accepted, and also in case we lose a card or have to cancel one.

In South Africa many businesses will not accept credit cards over the phone to order items ahead of time, as is common in the States.  This brings us to the various forms of electronic transfers…

Sending money electronically – should be easy, right?

Our experience is that South African banking is more sophisticated than in the United States.  Chiefly noticeable in the use of EFTs (Electronic Funds Transfer) for direct electronic payments via phone app.  IMPORTANT: EFTs ARE NOT WIRE TRANSFERS (aka SWIFT transfer) OR ACH.  Each one of those is it’s own type of financial transaction, and though similar the are not the same.  I offer you this guide:

• EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer): easily done from your handy phone app.  Just enter the payee’s banking details, enter the amount, hit send, and PRESTO!  Done.  Note that banking details are shared more freely than seems appropriate, but as these are payments only this information can’t be used to “pull” money, only for deposits, and is thus safe. Payments are effectively instantaneous, and free.  What’s the catch?  Can only be done from a South African (or perhaps other SADC country?) bank account.
• Wire/Swift Transfer (Whats the difference – not much): Wire transfers can be used as payment fairly widely in Southern Africa and many businesses will be prepared to offer the relevant banking details.  After sending a wire it typically takes a couple days to be received.  Also they tend to be expensive, and many banks require you to come into the branch in person to send them.  My experience is that banks do not send a lot of wires, and get confused when the information doesn’t perfectly match their computer system’s formatting.  The process in branch always seems to take forever and be painful.  Chase Checking accounts (and I think Bank of America, though unverified), allow you to send wires via their website or mobile app. We use the least expensive Chase checking account: Chase Total Checking. With Chase, some countries (including South Africa) you are allowed to send in local currency, reducing the fee to just $5 USD for transfers under $5000, and for free if over $5000.  What’s the catch?  The whole thing is the catch, nothing is easy, fast or cheap about wire transfers.  Avoid if possible.
• ACH: This is not really an option, I only mention for clarification.  This is when you provide a bank or financial institution your routing number and bank details and they send you one of those deposits for .26 cents and then two days later pulls out .10 and .16 cents and has you verify what they did.  This sets up a link between the two accounts for future debits or credits. You will not be able, nor would you want, to do this in Africa.  

When ordering something, say vehicle parts, ahead of time, or making bookings for campsites, many times payment will be requested by EFT. Which is impossible if you do not have a South African bank account.

The Non-Resident Bank Account (once thought impossible, but it isn’t)

We have had countless circular conversations with vendors, us asking if we could pay by credit card, as we had no way to EFT, only to be told that it would be much easier if we could just pay by EFT. Sigh. A few times we even had to resort to sending a wire, and paying the significant wire fee, just to pay for a low value item. We resolved to see if we could find a way to get a South African bank account.  

This was a saga that spanned more than one of our African trips. We had resigned ourselves to one last try when we spent a couple weeks with friends in Cape Town in March of 2020. After a couple false starts we made a friend from Holland who had successfully opened a checking account. He tipped us off to the “Non-resident cheque account” at FNB. FNB (First National Bank) branches are all over southern Africa, so this seemed promising. We went into our local FNB bank at the Sun Valley Mall, asked for a Non-resident account and a few days later were the proud owners of a local bank account. It sounds trivial, but we were super stoked.  

A few notes on this. We funded the account out of our stash of cash USD that we always keep squirreled away. After initial funding of your sweet new non-resident bank account you can add funds via wire transfer. As wire transfers are a hassle I suggest trying to do a single significant transfer instead of smaller ones. There are some rules that I do not understand on non residents holding foreign currency in South Africa, so when you transfer the money to your new checking account either transfer in rand, or convert to rand upon receipt. You also have to declare what the money is for, but there is a generic category for “general use or expenses” or something like that, I forget what it is specifically. I think if you got into large sums of money, such as for property or new vehicle purchase, this would get flagged, so proceed carefully. There is a modest monthly fee for the account.

Now that we have a funded South African bank account we can EFT from our app, sweet!  

Also know that two factor authentication is required on this account, and they really want you to use a South African mobile number for this, ostensibly for better security than email. The problem for us is that since we come and go, our mobile numbers expire after 90 days of inactivity. This means we end up with a new South African sim card and mobile number on each visit. This also means our two factor authentication doesn’t work. With a lot of patience on the phone and against the urges of FNB we were able to change this to two factor authentication via email. Though they discourage this, it is possible.

You must have the patience of a zen master to get through the phone calls to set this up, you will be put on hold multiple times, transferred to the wrong department, and you’ll need to explain 47 times that you don’t have a South African ID number or mobile number, but it will work.

According to the FNB website you can set up the non-resident account prior to even arriving in the country, but I am skeptical.  If try that and strike out, try again in person.

Note that there are some banks that have “foreign bank accounts” which is not what you want.  Those are for either FOREX traders or for South African’s living and working overseas.  

Vehicle Insurance

One of the big drivers to get a local bank account was so that we could pay for our vehicle insurance, which is only allowed to be paid by EFT. I have read reports of people managing to pay premiums via credit card, but we have never managed, and believe me, we have tried A LOT. In the interim we had a South African friend pay our insurance and we paid them. Now we are able to pay ourselves via EFT, hooray for small victories.

We found that some insurance companies needed a South African ID number to provide insurance, and thus could not issue insurance coverage to foreigners. As this isn’t the case with all insurers I believe this is more an issue with their computer systems rather than a legal requirement. We use Tuffstuff for our insurance and have found them very easy to work with.

What about cash?

Even if you are a dedicated credit card user, you will need cash in local currency. The further north you go on the continent, the more this is true. It will only take one or two fuel stops where no card is accepted to clean you out of local currency. Keep an eye out though, you’re not the only one handing over a fist full of dollars/kwacha/shillings to pay for fuel, so frequently if you have to pay for fuel in cash there are ATMs near by.

But what about ATM fees, don’t those add up? I’m glad you asked. They do. Unless you have an account that doesn’t doesn’t charge ATM fees, or reimburses ATM fees, which we do. My research has found only two of these accounts available in the USA, and one is expensive, making it not worth it in our case, the other takes one extra step to set up than a normal checking account but is otherwise easy.  

For those with lots of money: Chase Sapphire Banking.  No ATM fees, foreign transaction fees, non-Chase ATM fees reimbursed word wide and no wire fees. Sounds great, right? The catch, requires either $75,000 to be held to avoid the $25/dollar a month fee. Too rich for our blood, so unless you have a lot of cash sitting around, probably not the way to go.  

For the rest of us: A Charles Schwab Checking account. Retail banking is not Schwab’s primary business, so when you sign up for a Schwab checking account it comes with a Schwab investment account, whether you want it or not. The good part is that if you don’t want a Schwab investment account you don’t have to fund this, it can just sit at $0 dollars, and there is no fee. Schwab has no foreign transaction fees and unlimited ATM fee reimbursement worldwide. Other than the cadillac Chase account above, I do not know of any other ATM card that offers this, so for us it was worth the extra step of having an unused investment account (we do have an investment account, but I am a Vanguard loyalist). We linked our Schwab and Chase account (via ACH, remember that?) and fund it from Chase checking. Transfers to the Schwab account take 2-4 days, so plan at least a little ahead.  

Other Money Stuff

Very common in South Africa is the use of mobile apps like Zapper and Snapscan. You link these apps to your credit card. Then, when you go to a vendor that will usually have one or the other (I think Snapscan is a little more popular) they’ll have a QR code at the register, but may not take a credit card.  You scan the QR code with your app, type in the amount owed, hit send, and your done. 

Also occasionally you’ll run across “Payfast”. This is kind of like Paypal in the US and is a legitimate website. You can fund a Payfast account from a South African bank account or a credit card, and send payments from their website.  

Another mobile system is Mpesa  Kenya pioneered mobile branchless banking perhaps earlier, faster and better than any country in the world. I worked in Kenya in 2008 and Mpesa was already widely in use. This system does not require a smart phone, which is great as it makes it accessible to many more people, unlike Paypal, Snapscan and all the rest. Vendors have a unique ID number and you can pay for goods and services from your Mpesa credit from any cell phone. You can also covert Mpesa credit to cash at any of the numerous Mpesa stalls found all over Kenya and seven other countries, and similar systems exist in other African nations. When you get to a new country ask around and almost anyone will be able to tell you the ins and outs of whatever the local mobile banking system is.  

Our experience is that navigating the ins and outs of handling money, paying for insurance and all the rest is part what differentiates long term travel from a couple week trip. The mundane actions of opening a bank account and standing in line with everyone else bring us a tiny bit closer to reality of regular residents less from the high perch aloft that tourists often find themselves in. It’s all part of the experience.