New analysis by Paymenow reveals that many young employed South Africans are using early access to their wages to bridge cashflow gaps for everyday essentials between paydays.
More than half of active users on the Paymenow’s earned-wage access (EWA) and financial wellness platform are under 35. And its latest data reveals that young users accounted for 53,5% of all platform activity by volume and 45,7% by value. The average youth transaction is R260, against R354 for users aged 36 to 60. This is consistent with the design of EWA as a top-up between paydays.
Together, transport and food account for 44,6% of youth cash-out transactions: 26,2% of cash-outs by young users go to transportation costs; 18,4% to food; and 7,6% to medical emergencies.
“The data paints a picture of a generation of working young South Africans using their earned wages to cover the basics – using transport, putting food on the table, and dealing with unexpected medical bills,” says Denise Neethling, head of Marketing at Paymenow. “In a high cost-of-living environment with rising inflation, earned-wage access is being used in exactly the way it was designed: as a small, regular top-up between paydays that helps people manage cashflow without taking on debt.”
Where transactions stay inside the Paymenow app as value-added purchases, young users are the dominant cohort. They account for 58,4% of airtime purchases, 58,6% of data, 64% of in-app transport bookings, and 51,3% of voucher activity. Older users lead on electricity (56,4%) and fuel (62,5%), reflecting a life stage in which more are heading households or running cars.
Young people are also the predominant users of Paymenow’s financial-education modules, having completed 1 228 305 lessons in Paymenow’s in-app financial-education programme – 55,1% of all completions, and more than the adult and senior cohorts put together.
The most-completed modules among young users are CreditScore (120 714), Introduction to basic financial wellness (102 167), Create a budget (83 895), and Savings options (76 606). Beyond the lessons, 68,1% of registered youth have run a credit-score check through the app, and 2 412 young savers have put away R1,05-million in savings.
The picture across cash-out behaviour, education uptake, and savings activity reflects a deliberate broadening of Paymenow’s offering. The company has evolved into a financial wellness platform, with earned wage access serving as the entry point and a wider set of tools including budgeting modules, credit-score tracking, and the in-app savings product sitting alongside it. The intent is to give working South Africans a single place to access the wages they have already earned, build the knowledge to manage them well, and start putting money aside for the longer-term.
This Youth Month, the data points to a generation of working South Africans using technology to take a more active role in their own financial wellbeing – from how they manage cashflow between paydays to how they build the knowledge to manage credit, and saving over the longer-term.