Research, education, standards and public registers for South Africa’s private-lending market.
Private Lending Associationof South Africa

Reference

Reference data

Four maintained classifications of the South African private-lending market, published as JSON and free to reuse with attribution.

What this is

The Association maintains four classifications of this market: what a capital provider can hold, what gets financed, who does the work, and what the words mean. They are not articles about the market — they are a structured description of it, and they are the part most likely to be useful to somebody else.

Each is published as JSON, versioned and dated, under CC BY 4.0. Reuse it, including commercially, including in a product. Attribute the Private Lending Association of South Africa and link to the source. No permission needed and none has to be asked for.

The datasets

Legal positions in South African private lending

v2.0

The four positions a capital provider can be in when supplying capital to lending — making a loan, buying the rights to repayments, lending to a lending business, and investing in a fund — with the debtor, the distinction most often missed, and the regulatory consequence of each.

Use it for
Classifying an arrangement correctly: which of four positions a capital provider is actually in, and therefore who owes them.
Size
4 legal positions
Last modified
18 September 2026

Download /data/positions.json

Sectors of South African private lending

v1.0

Nine areas in which private capital lends in South Africa, from community-scheme finance to non-bank consumer credit, each with named published South African evidence that the activity occurs and the positions through which capital commonly participates.

Use it for
Mapping the market by what is financed, separately from what a capital provider holds.
Size
9 sectors
Last modified
18 September 2026

Download /data/sectors.json

Professional roles in South African private lending

v1.1

Eighteen recognisable roles across origination, capital, operations, professional advice and recovery — what each does, whether it is typically paid on business placed, and whether it may require authorisation or registration.

Use it for
Identifying who does what in a transaction, and which roles carry a commission or a registration requirement.
Size
18 roles
Last modified
18 September 2026

Download /data/roles.json

South African private-lending glossary

v1.2

Definitions of the terms used in South African private lending, including the words that carry more than one legal meaning and are therefore routinely misread.

Use it for
Using the market's vocabulary precisely, and spotting where a word is ambiguous.
Size
61 terms
Last modified
18 September 2026

Download /data/glossary.json

01 — Licence and reuseYou may use this

Published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Reuse it, including commercially, including in a product. Attribute the Private Lending Association of South Africa and link to the source. No permission needed and none has to be asked for.

Each file carries its own version, licence and suggested citation inside it, so a copy that travels keeps its provenance. If you build something on this data and it is useful, the Association would like to know — editor@privatelendingassociation.co.za — but you do not need to ask.

Two files are also published for language models and retrieval systems: /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt.

02 — VersioningHow these change

The minor number changes when entries are added or corrected. The major number changes when the shape of the classification changes.

The legal-positions dataset is at version 2.0 for that reason: until 18 September 2026 this site published a single fifteen-model taxonomy that mixed what is financed with what a capital provider holds and who may take part. That produced generalisations which were true of some arrangements and false of others. It was replaced by three separate dimensions, and the change was substantial enough to be a major version rather than a quiet correction.

Where a dataset is corrected, the previous version is not silently overwritten in the record: the change is noted here with its date. See the editorial policy.

Cite this page

Private Lending Association of South Africa, “Reference data”, privatelendingassociation.co.za/data, last reviewed 18 September 2026.

Free to quote with attribution under CC BY 4.0. Where the Association has not established something, the page says so — an absence of a finding is not a favourable finding.