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# Discovery Bank has made its first annual profit, seven years after Discovery started building it
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/discovery-bank-superbank-fy2026-profit/
- Published: 2026-09-09T03:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-09T05:12:19.000Z
- Description: The first full-year profit is small. The 70% of new business arriving from strangers is the number the strategy actually rests on.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Companies, Business Bagel News

Discovery Bank has spent its whole life losing money, and it has stopped. The bank reported a normalised operating profit of R370 million for the year to June, against a R68 million loss the year before, and it is the first full-year profit since the bank went to market in 2019.

The profit itself is small next to the R17.75 billion the group made overall. What the bank is for matters more. Discovery sells medical scheme administration, life cover, short-term insurance and investments, and each of those businesses has historically had to go and find its own customers. The bank is meant to be the door they all come through.

## Where the new customers are coming from

Client numbers rose 26% to 1.57 million over the year, and revenue reached R3.1 billion. About 70% of that new business came from people who were not Discovery customers at all, which is the number Adrian Gore reaches for when he argues the bank is more than a cross-sell, and the one that decides whether the strategy works.

The balance sheet grew with them. Retail deposits rose 17% to R27.2 billion. Lending grew faster, with gross retail advances up by two fifths, and home loans did most of that work: the book more than doubled, past R4 billion.

Discovery is careful about how it says that. Gore's evidence for quality is that 73% of new home loans went to super-prime borrowers, which he says is the highest share in the market, with a credit loss ratio on that book of 0.15%. Most of it is switch business, homeowners moving an existing bond for a better rate rather than buying a house.

## What happens on 1 October

The second phase of the super bank plan starts on 1 October, running the rest of the group's businesses through the bank app with AI joining them up. The target attached to it is R3 billion of annual bank profit by 2029, roughly eight times what the bank made this year. Gore calls it a big ask and says the group is comfortable it is on track.

The rest of Discovery paid for the patience. Normalised operating profit from the South African businesses rose 16% to R13.87 billion, with Discovery Health, Discovery Life and Discovery Invest each adding single-digit growth and Discovery Insure well ahead of them at 29%.

Nedbank named Discovery Bank in its own annual report this year as a start-up making real inroads on customer deposits, which is the kind of compliment that only arrives once a rival has started counting.