The Reserve Bank supervises South Africa's banks and insurers, and part of that job is checking that they know who their customers are. It does it by inspection: the Prudential Authority takes a sample of client files and reads them. On Friday morning it published what it found at three institutions, and the notices name Capitec, Ninety One Assurance and Albaraka Bank.
None of it is about money laundering. Both Capitec and Ninety One Assurance say the findings involve no laundering, no fraud, no scams and no client losing anything, and the notices make no such allegation. Both paid and neither appealed.
What R28 million buys you
Capitec's penalty is five separate ones added together, and each has a section of the Act behind it. Checking who the customer is cost R10 million. Extra checks on higher-risk customers cost R5 million, and carrying on checking after the account is open cost another R5 million. Failing to keep training the sampled staff cost R3 million.
The last R5 million is the least obvious and the most telling. Capitec's business bank put its name-screening and payment-screening manuals into use before management had approved them, could not show that it had documented and signed off how it reports property linked to terrorism until after the regulator gave notice it was coming, and had gaps in the written controls behind both. R5.5 million of the R28 million is suspended for three years.
Ninety One Assurance's R6 million splits two ways: R2.5 million for enhanced due diligence on sampled files, and R3.5 million for a risk programme that was meant to cover sanctions and prominent-person screening and did not do it well enough. Both firms cooperated, and Ninety One says it has already done the remedial work.
The dates at the bottom of the notices
The penalties are older than the press releases. Capitec's suspension runs from 13 October 2025, Ninety One Assurance's from 19 June 2025, and Albaraka's from 10 June 2024. South Africa left the Financial Action Task Force grey list on 24 October 2025, so the Ninety One sanction had been running for four months by the time the country came off. National Treasury said at the time that the task force expects delisted countries to keep showing results, sanctions included.
The third notice is the one with a warning in it. Albaraka was penalised R1.6 million off a 2021 inspection, for reporting 232 cash threshold reports and 144 suspicious transaction reports late. Separately, it had been fined R2 million over checks on its trade-finance clients, took that one to the Appeal Board, and had it set aside.
Neither Capitec nor Ninety One put anything on the exchange news service about any of this. It is Capitec's second Financial Intelligence Centre Act penalty in under two years: the first, R56.25 million, arrived in December 2024 off inspections in 2021 and 2022.
