Capitec Bank

Look, we... we um come in at a cost of at about 55 60 percent cost of our major opposition players in the market so we had about 1.6 million rand for a setup of a of a turnkey operation Of that, the franchisee requires R800,000 unencumbered cash.

And then we partner with Capitec and they give the franchisee another R800,000 and an overdraft of R100,000, R150,000, which is more than enough to... get the business through the first month or two and our stores trade reasonably well from the start.

So you're not starved from cash and part of the setup, we pay 60,000 Rand towards the stock, the opening stock of the shop.

So, you know, that's about a hundred thousand Rand sales.

And Amnon Chetty has been at five different banks in the past 20 years.

He's got a lot of experience and has included Capitec, Net Group and Standard Bank.

And I would assume that most probably he most probably worked with Kenny Bongani at Standard Bank.

And maybe that's why he came across to African Bank in August 2023.

Share prices are reflecting an all-round improvement for the industry and first round this week, despite making a more than 17 billion rand provision for the UK motor finance scandal, reporting record results with key profitability measures like the return on equity hitting an astonishing 24%.

Only Capitec is higher.

Well, earlier, I caught up with Mary Villacasi, the chief executive of First Rant.

It was not the greatest connection that we had, but there was time to ask her, where on earth is all of this growth coming from?

Because if you look at the companies that I've spoken about, a lot of them have got those characteristics.

Having said that, I think if you look at a Capitec, for instance, that's become a big company.

That's sort of circa 4 or 5% of the JSC, if you look at sort of the representative benchmarks or indices.

And that's just by virtue of its performance, the way that it's competed in the market.

So that becomes a constraint in a sense that the asset managers are forced to follow.

Now, when you look at that group of companies, let's say it's the All Share Index or that's, you know, whatever, 200 companies or whatever.

Naturally, you know, if we all analyze these companies and Capitec pops up as a really good company and that's the truth of the matter, the money is going to then concentrate into the Capitec industry.

But I think also the criticism that we can level at asset managers is that at times there is a bit of herd mentality in the sense that companies don't become big by virtue of just being there.

When you look at our market share now, our market share is 14.9%.

The only other big player bigger than us in that segment is Capitec.

And when you also think about the fact that Salsa has asked virtually every grant beneficiary to go and re-register themselves and go through a review, which meant that there was a contracting of the base because some people lost their grants in that process.

we were able to grow our customer base faster than any other financial institution in that market.

And 18, I'm not gonna stop there.

I mean, like, if I could get it down to 12, that's, that's the aim, right? I wanna be able to, uh, compete with Standard Bank or Capitec-

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