Lesetja Kganyago: More or less regulation - responding to a changing global environment
Keynote address by Mr Lesetja Kganyago, Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, at Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, 25 September 2025.
The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.
Good evening.
It is always a great pleasure to engage with the students and staff of Stellenbosch University. I extend my gratitude to the Law Faculty for the invitation to speak with you today.
In my capacity as Chancellor of this university, I wish to acknowledge Mr Gys Steyn for establishing the Gys Steyn Chair in Financial Regulation Law. In South Africa, we need more interdisciplinary academic work on financial stability issues to both inform policy and build stronger relationships with financial regulators and policymakers.
I have been involved in financial sector policymaking for close to four decades, both locally and internationally. Over this time, financial stability risks have continuously evolved, and financial regulators have, on far too many occasions, been too slow to identify and respond to them. As we have seen with the Great Financial Crisis (GFC), regulators' inability to anticipate these risks clearly demonstrated the enormous cost of overlooking these issues.