South Africa Reserve Bank — OCARM Cash Cycle Resilience Program

The following stakeholders were involved in the development of the project:

• South African Reserve Bank (SARB) – Currency Management Department
• Financial Sector Contingency Forum (FSCF)
• OCARM Committee (FSCF sub‑committee)
• Commercial Banks (South Africa)
• Cash‑in‑Transit (CIT) Operators
• Banking Association of South Africa (BASA) and its members
• Payments Association of South Africa (PASA)
• South African Banking Risk Information Centre (SABRIC)
• Cash‑in‑Transit Association of South Africa (CITASA)
• National Cash Management Industry Business Continuity Forum
• SARB Joint Operational Crisis Forum (JOC)
• PayInc.

The South Africa Orderly Closure And Reopening of Markets (OCARM) Cash Cycle Resilience Program strengthens the national cash ecosystem by integrating orderly market closure and reopening arrangements with standing cash resilience capabilities. Cash functions as a critical public utility, and during systemic disruption, loss of access has immediate social and economic consequences, particularly for cash-reliant households and essential-goods supply chains.

The program combines three mutually reinforcing components. First, a dedicated Cash Response Team OCARM playbook defines authority, triggers, communication protocols, staged shutdown, and restart actions to enable orderly execution under extreme scenarios. Second, a financial-sector-wide OCARM simulation exercise, aligned to international crisis and business continuity standards, validates readiness, exposes operational dependencies and strengthens reopening capability across the cash value chain. Third, the program embeds standing crisis governance and operational resilience levers, including buffer stock policies, balance-sheet relief mechanisms, offshore business-continuity printing options and contingency responses for extreme demand shocks.

The design reflects a realistic systemic crisis risk context, explicitly testing degraded communications, constrained mobility, security threats, and surging public demand for cash. By combining documented playbooks, sector-wide exercising, and capacity levers, the program ensures that, if market closure is required, it remains orderly in practice while preserving cash availability and acceptance throughout the disruption.

The initiative is institutionalised through permanent governance structures and repeatable exercises, making it both sustainable over time and readily replicable across jurisdictions, crisis scenarios and sectors.

South Africa

Method of determining impact – Impact is evaluated through:

1. Formal exercise-based validation: using defined evaluation criteria (team composition, alternates, communication/call-tree effectiveness, dependencies, documented processes/flows, and reopening readiness), and post-exercise polling/assessment captured in the OCARM exercise reporting.Refer to Exhibit 1 (attached image): OCARM Simulation Exercise Participant Objective Assessment – Achievement rated from A – Strongly Disagree to E – Strongly Agree

2. Real‑world crisis response evidence:  Over the period 9-18 July 2021, social unrest affected parts of South Africa, mainly concentrated in the Kwa-Zulu Natal and Gauteng provinces. The riots that attended this crisis resulted in extensive damage to the infrastructure of Commercial Bank branches, ATM’s and Retailers. Each infrastructure attack site, or hotspot, is depicted within Exhibit 2 below.Refer to Exhibit 2 (attached image): “A map depicting ‘ hotspots’ or the location of each (infrastructure) attack as sourced from News24 (the original and a description link includes a description o of what took place at each attack site). Source: https://specialprojects.news24.com/-unrestsa-map-hotspots-looting-kzn-gauteng/index.html

A Cash Response Team was convened to respond to the crisis. It created the visibility of inventory held at the Commercial Bank Branches, ATM’s and Cash Centres that assisted the SARB to supply the additional demand for the cash that needed to be replaced. A total cash injection of R2.5 billion was provided by the SARB to assist the industry recovery. Total injection based on pre-uprising holdings: ATM recovery inventory = R 1,312,933,872; Bank Branch recovery inventory = R 1,139,333,438. A total of R 2,452,267,310 was injected into the supply chain during this period.

Other examples of the efficacy of the program:

• During the COVID-19 grant period, monthly grants of R5.6bn and a measured ~20% increase in cash demand vs 2019, with SARB injecting R5bn of new banknotes to support the system response.
• The same deck documents a 66% spike in cash demand (baseline) in KZN during floods, illustrating “demand shock” behaviour and the need for rapid distribution measures.

In summary, the foregoing examples show that:

1. Demand shocks are real and material;
2. the program’s playbooks, coordination and supply levers are grounded in crisis experience; and
3. The OCARM simulation adds structured, repeatable validation to strengthen preparedness and reopening capability.

This program benefits all cash users by protecting everyday cash access and acceptance during disruption, with specific relevance for:

• People reliant on cash during outages when digital rails may be degraded;
• Retailers and essential-goods supply chains that need dependable ‘cash-in/cash-out’ functioning;
• The broader financial sector by reducing the risk of disorderly closure/reopening of cash services during OCARM events.

The program is sustainable because it is built as an institutionalised cycle: documented playbooks, defined structures, and repeated exercises with continuous improvement. The OCARM exercise report explicitly recommends ongoing rehearsals, call-tree testing, documentation centralisation, and strengthened reopening artefacts such as templates, checklists and holding statements — all of which support long-term maturity rather than one-off compliance.

It is replicable because the approach is modular: any jurisdiction can combine:

(1) a cash-industry playbook,

(2) scenario-based exercising with clear criteria, and

(3) contingency levers (buffers, BCP supply, emergency governance) tailored to local constraints.

Ingenuity lies in integrating a cash playbook into a broader OCARM framework designed for “orderly closure and reopening,” while also confronting the uniquely physical constraints of the cash cycle (mobility, security, settlement dependencies, and communication degradation).

Collaboration is extensive by design: the CRT structure spans SARB Currency Management, Banking Association of South Africa (BASA), PASA, SABRIC, CITASA, banks, CIT providers and other ecosystem participants; and the OCARM exercise convened cross-industry stakeholders with formal facilitation and observation roles.