Urgent reform is needed to bring the Johannesburg Interbank Average Rate in line with new standards for key lending benchmarks, the deputy governor of South Africa’s central bank has warned.

“At a fundamental level, it is unsustainable that at least 40 trillion rand [$2.75 trillion] worth of financial contracts are priced off a three-month reference rate derived from daily indicative prices of a market that, on average, is underpinned by only 66 million rand worth of transactions,” said the