Binance has launched support for South African rand manual bank deposits.

Customers with South African bank accounts can onramp their fiat currency to the exchange via regular electronic funds transfer (EFT) and buy cryptocurrency. Previously, Binance only supported South African bank transfers via Instant EFT.

Both its Instant EFT and manual EFT options are supplied by Stitch, a South African financial API infrastructure startup that has raised $27 million (R460 million) in various funding rounds since February 2021. Neither the manual EFT nor Instant EFT systems currently attract a transaction fee.

The trade-off between them is that Instant EFT requires that you provide your online banking username and password, and the payment will clear immediately. Direct bank deposits can take 0–2 days to reflect, and the customer must initiate the EFT from their bank’s app or online banking portal.

Stitch insists it no longer uses screen-scraping to verify that Instant EFT transactions have gone through but instead employs its own “portal emulation technology”. Stitch has also assured that customer banking credentials are secure and that neither it nor the merchants that use its service have access to them.

Instead, they hold a randomly generated token representing the credentials. Credentials are sent from a vault stored in Microsoft’s Azure cloud to the bank when making an Instant EFT. While manual EFTs can take longer to process, most South African banks offer immediate or real-time clearing payments for an additional fee.

Binance confirmed that if you select this option when making a manual transfer from your bank’s app or website, it will be deposited immediately. “All other options will take up to 2 business days,” it stated. “Deposits will be subject to standard bank processing hours.”

All users need to complete “know-your-customer” (i.e. FICA) to make rand deposits and withdrawals on Binance, the exchange said.