Capitec Stalking Giants – T J Strydom

‘Send two guys out into the wide world and say, “Start a business”. Sometimes he didn’t even give them money; he said, “You find the money,”’ Le Roux told them. ‘We think places like Poland, Mexico [and] Chile could be interesting. Probably more than South Africa. But if you talk like that, you ask, but who speaks Polish? It really is a massive decision,’ he added.249 In 2011, Stassen remarked that the cost of entering a new market was so severe that Capitec would only want to be in ‘high-potential countries’.

That meant nations with a sizable population that had similar needs to South Africans, but still had a relatively stable economy – destinations such as Brazil, other parts of Latin America, or even Eastern Europe. ‘For this reason, we’d rather go into India than Namibia, for example,’ he said.250 Even before being able to open a single account, however, the institution would need to comply with a totally different country’s banking regime.

In 2015, Le Roux said the dream was passing. In 2017 Stassen, who had by this time retired as CEO and moved into the chair’s chair, reckoned it would only happen when the South African market was saturated. When that would be was anyone’s guess. That same year, Capitec concluded its first foreign acquisition, buying a 40 per cent stake in an Eastern European fintech business named Cream Finance. For Capitec it, quite literally, wasn’t a big deal and the bank settled the purchase price of €21 million in cash.

Seven years later this solitary overseas investment contributed a profit. Measured against the bank’s other operations, it was a modest figure, but according to Fourie, the move had been a good one. From the platteland to the cities, from taxi ranks to suburban malls, Capitec remained, overwhelmingly, a South African business. Of all the companies on the JSE, the bank from Stellenbosch became the largest with a primary focus on its local market – more than 99 per cent of Capitec’s operations were on home soil.

1kitap1.com/en Focus ‘Riaan always sees to it that one thing is wrapped up or at least under control before he tackles a next project.’ – Michiel le Roux.251 Capitec wanted to be a bank, nothing else – and, initially, nowhere else other than in South Africa. And it wanted to grant loans and open savings accounts.

That was all. But, with growing client numbers, an extensive branch network, and an ever-stronger brand, there was, of course, always the alluring possibility of fat profits through the sale of other products. ‘I have taken various propositions to them,’ lamented Jannie Mouton in a 2014 discussion at the Gordon Institute of Business Science.

Writers work over a long period and do extensive research to create a book which is eventually published. The ebook version of such a title is, like the printed edition, not free of charge. You may therefore not distribute the ebook for free, but have to purchase it from an authorised ebook merchant. Should you distribute the ebook for free, you violate the Copyright Act 98 of 1978 and render yourself liable to prosecution. 1kitap1.com/en Tafelberg 1kitap1.com/en To Theuns and Nellie Strydom For introducing me to South Africa’s financial sector with that savings account at the Post Office in the 1980s.

Thank you for that, and for everything else. 1kitap1.com/en Yet we need to remind ourselves each time we are tempted to beat our chest with pride, that such sectors where we are in the league of the best in the world, face the urgent and mammoth challenge of lifting the rest of the economy and society to new heights.

– Nelson Mandela, at the 75th anniversary of the Reserve Bank, 1996. Things either need to change, or stay the same, but like this we cannot continue. – a Stellenbosch student aphorism, early 2000s. 1kitap1.com/en The banking banquet For decades, it was fun to be a big bank in South Africa. Sure, the politics was complicated and the markets were turbulent, but there was good money to be made from the country’s white middle class.

Smaller competitors could be a bother at times, but after a swift kick they mostly disappeared with little more than a whelp. By the 1990s the corporate head offices of the old giants took up entire street blocks in the glitzier parts of Johannesburg’s CBD. Clients were used to banking halls of heavy wood and pale marble, hushed like old-world cathedrals. Behind bulletproof glass or bars of solid steel stood know-it-all tellers. Banking was serious and these spaces were a place to be humble.

If you did something wrong they made you feel small. That queue, that form filled in this way not that. In the back rooms herds of banking personnel roamed around making mysterious entries in files, leaving a paper trail deep enough to fill encyclopaedias. It was the sort of bureaucracy that would give Kafka fever dreams. It, nonetheless, turned a massive money mill. Costs were high, penalties were stiff, and from institution to institution it was all just about the same.

It was a machine – an exclusive group who slotted together cleanly and colluded informally, but technically stayed within the letter of the law. The old giants could afford to turn their noses up at the ‘unbanked’ – the millions of black South Africans who had for decades been excluded from formal banking services, but who collectively represented a massive untapped market.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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