A bank account is supposed to be a form of protection. It holds a person’s money out of harm’s way, records their identity, and gives them standing in a formal economy that a cash-only life denies. For migrants in South Africa, financial inclusion delivered exactly that — an account, a card, a documented financial self. What the current wave of anti-migrant hostility exposes is the limit of that protection: an account can hold a customer’s money and still do nothing to keep the customer safe, reachable or able to transact when they are forced from their home.
When protesters go door to door, as reported, the person displaced may still have a fully compliant account and be entirely unable to use it — cut off from the branch, from documents left behind, from the address on file. Inclusion solved the problem of access to a product. It did not solve the problem of security for the person holding it.
Inclusion Without Security: The Gap Made Visible
The financial system measured its progress with migrants in accounts opened, cards issued, corridors formalised. Those are real gains. But the metrics assumed a stable customer in a stable dwelling with retrievable documents — the ordinary conditions of banking. A displacement event removes all three at once. The customer is mobile, possibly across a border; the dwelling is unsafe or abandoned; the documents that KYC depends on may be lost in the leaving.
At that moment the account inverts. The security features built to protect the customer — branch-based verification, address-linked servicing, document-dependent authentication — become barriers. The system designed to include now cannot follow. This is the gap between financial inclusion and physical or legal security, and it is not a rhetorical point; it is an operational failure mode that banks and fintechs can anticipate and design against.
An account that cannot reach its owner in a crisis is a product that stops at the edge of ordinary life.
Building for the Displacement Case
The constructive response is a set of protocols for the displacement case — treating it as a foreseeable event to be serviced, not an exception to be improvised. Three capabilities matter most.
First, emergency access. A displaced customer needs to reach and move their own money without a branch visit or a physical card. That means robust remote authentication that does not collapse the moment an address changes or a device is lost, and a clearly signposted emergency-access route a frightened customer can find under pressure. The design test is simple: can a customer who has left home with only a phone still control their account today.
Second, remote servicing. Address-of-record and branch dependence should not be single points of failure. Customers should be able to update contact details, freeze and unfreeze cards, and receive support through channels that survive relocation — including across borders, since some customers will be servicing accounts from Zimbabwe, Mozambique or Lesotho, not from the township they banked in.
Third, document recovery. KYC records that a bank already holds should be recoverable to a customer who has lost the physical originals. An institution that verified a customer once holds the means to help re-establish that customer’s documented identity; a document-recovery protocol turns that latent capability into a service, and keeps a displaced customer inside the formal system rather than pushing them toward informality.
The institution that plans for the displacement case keeps the customer; the one that treats it as an edge case loses them to fear and to cash.
Why This Is Business, Not Charity
These protocols are commercial before they are humane. A displaced customer who cannot reach their account reverts to informal channels, exits the compliance perimeter, and is expensive or impossible to win back. A customer who is followed through a crisis — reached, serviced, helped to recover documents — is retained, and remembers which institution held its nerve. Retention through disruption is worth more than acquisition in calm, and the reputational return across a migrant customer base is durable. Government has acknowledged the broader situation at cabinet level, but the servicing gap is one the financial sector must close itself.
The So-What for the Desk
The action is to build emergency-access, remote-servicing and document-recovery protocols before the next march, not after it — designed for a customer who has left home with a phone and nothing else, servicing an account possibly from across a border, and needing to re-establish an identity the institution already verified once. Inclusion put migrants inside the formal system. Security is what determines whether the system is still theirs on the worst day. The account cannot protect its owner physically; the institution behind it can at least make sure it never abandons them financially.
