Entrepreneurs play a big role in creating employment in South Africa, businesspeople from Durbanville were told at a network event of Durbanville Business last Thursday at 360° Bloemendal.
Gerrie Fourie, chief executive officer of Capitec, was the guest speaker and shared anecdotes about the success road of Capitec.
“Everybody talks about an unemployment rate of 33%. (At Capitec we talk about an) unemployment rate of between 10 and 12%. I have hundreds of examples in the townships of women who sell vetkoek at one rand a vetkoek. Their costs are 50 cents per vetkoek and they sell a thousand vetkoeke per day. These women are considered unemployed.
“I have examples of people who sell vegetables and goods, who earn between R50 000 and R80 000 per day, and their net profit is 50%.
“How do we bank these people? We need to make banking simple. We have lowered the costs of a point of sale machine R99 for our entry level and R199 for our top end.
“We made our commission rates simpler. Ours are simple, easy, transparent and all legal. We want to give people with money a bank account. These people don’t have assets, but they have a cash flow.
“I have told you many beautiful stories of people who we have helped when they have just started, and today have three, four or five bakkies that operate.”
Emerging market
“If we want to be successful in South Africa, then we have to unlock the emerging market,” Fourie said. “It is not the big companies and the state that will create jobs, it is the entrepreneurs that will employ people.
“It’s an incredible journey that we are on. I think it lies within our culture. I once said at a conference that you can go to Switzerland . . . everything works, but there are no opportunities.
“In South Africa nothing works, but there are a lot of opportunities,” he said.
In his introduction of Fourie to the audience, Andries Venter, vice-chair of Durbanville Business, said under Fourie’s leadership Capitec has grown into South Africa’s largest retail bank by client numbers, exceeding 23 million clients in 2024, and now also expanding into other business and insurance offerings.
“During his 25-year tenure Capitec has evolved from a niche player to an industry leader, offering comprehensive financial services while maintaining simplicity, affordability and transparency.
“He has spearheaded the development of the award-winning banking app, advanced digital banking platforms and innovative credit solutions. His leadership has earned him recognition as one of South Africa’s top business leaders, with Capitec consistently being lauded for customer satisfaction and innovation.”
South African story
Fourie said the story of Capitec’s success over 25 years is an incredible South African story.
“We can say that we started something in 2000 and look where we are now. I was 37 years old at the time, our executive committee was also between 37 and 40 years old. To say you take the traditional four banks on in their field, and go out with a different attitude, do things differently and disrupt banking, is half crazy,” he said.
“But if you believe in something, if you have that passion, drive and focus, you can achieve anything. If you look at South Africa, in the last 10 years our economy has not grown, but Capitec has grown with about 20% per year.
“The first six months you start with the business, you jump in and do certain things. You just want to grow, and you just want to make happy clients. But we actually sat for six to nine months, and we wrote a business plan. We debated about every single aspect of the business. We debated about what are our fundamentals. Simplicity, accessibility, affordability, and service is our fundamentals that we live by. And until today, if we make any decision, we go back to those four fundamentals.
“That business plan said we will do retail, and we will do retail alone. And as you know now, we have moved completely away to different areas.
“But, when we started, we said we will have one product, which is everything. The access is the same for everybody, no matter if you are rich, or if you have average income or who you are. And your price structure is 100% the same. That principle is still there today,” he said.
“If I talk to people in the business community, they ask me how is your service better than other people? We said, first of all, we went to appoint the best people. Then in 2012, we went so far as to say, every screen is what we call side by side consulting, where what the consultant see, is exactly the same as what the client sees. It’s is there on the computer; you can see, you can’t afford this loan. It’s that kind of system that makes a difference in detail,” he said.
“It takes you 12 years to build a brand, and then comes consistency. You have to do everything exactly the same so that you can build trust. And we all know, trust you break in seconds.
“It was actually in 2014 when the African Bank went under that we finally got to the point where people saw that we are totally different and we are a bank. It was an absolute obsession that every branch, every consultant, every person did exactly the same. We always said, we are not a bank. A bank looks at risk first, then at its client. We are a retailer – a retailer first looks at his client and then he looks at risk.
“That is part of our formula. And that is also why you have to make sure that each of the 860 branches work exactly the same,” he said.
In 2014, we first released our app. And today our app is one of our most important channels. We now have 12.5 million clients who use the app at least once a month. We have 16 million clients who have already used the app.
“If you look at our strategy, we say we have to have branches and we have to have an app. It is very easy to do a transaction, but if you want to do something a bit more difficult, then you want to talk to someone.
“We are already at 23 million clients, and we hope to be at 25 million by the end of the year. In January alone, 200 000 new clients joined us,” he said.
“We had a strategic session in 2017 and we said that if we want to serve our clients, we have to offer financial services in totality. We cannot just be a retail bank, we have to offer other goods too.
“In the last four years, we’ve spent R6.5 billion on investment on growth in the digital space. When the economy was down, and everyone was trying to survive, we said we’re going to go, and we’re going to grow. So you need to be different and to think differently,” he said.
“Retail is still our biggest source of income. To do that, you need data.
“It starts with airtime. We control now about 37% to 38% of all airtime that gets paid through our app. If I look at electricity, we now control about 30% of all that’s going through our apps.
“We’ve launched Capital Connect and have about 1.5 million clients. How do we optimise it? The answer is data, because then I understand who you’re phoning, when you’re phoning, what time you’re phoning, and all of that we can use to optimise our client base,” he said.
