GoTyme has put a date on joining South Africa's banking top three. At a media briefing on 29 October, the bank said it expects to rank third by monthly active users in early 2027. It launched to the public as TymeBank in 2019, is majority-owned by Patrice Motsepe's African Rainbow Capital and now counts 13 million registered South African customers.
Active users is the harder measure, because it counts only people who actually use their account, and GoTyme has just over eight million of them. On registered customers alone, Bloomberg reports, it is already the country's second-biggest bank.
Free payments as the front door
The briefing was about getting those customers to do more through their accounts, and the starting point is paying people. Almost 70% of the payments GoTyme customers make are instant and free. PayShap, the banks' system for sending money straight to a cellphone number, took off among them, with use up more than 250% in a year, and about 26% of all PayShap cellphone payments in the country now start in a GoTyme account. The bank reckons free instant payments save its customers more than R150 million a year.
A loan book that more than doubled
The numbers behind it were the strongest GoTyme has shown. Income rose 25% to R2.72 billion and deposits grew 27%. Lending grew fastest: loans to customers were up 126%, to R5.08 billion. "Our lending business has expanded substantially," chief executive Cheslyn Jacobs said.
Next year is built around more of the same. GoTyme plans a credit card in 2027, an upgraded version of MoreTyme, its buy-now-pay-later product, and more personal lending through its partnership with Sanlam, the continent's largest insurer.
The borrowers already spoken for
Jacobs named the limit himself. "There's no more people today than there were 15 years ago who can go to a bank and borrow money to buy a home, borrow money to buy a car, borrow money to start a business," he said, as reported by ITWeb.
If the pool of creditworthy South Africans is not growing, signing up more account holders does not by itself produce more borrowers. Much of GoTyme's lending growth would have to come from people who already borrow somewhere else, which puts it up against the banks they use today. ITWeb noted that Jacobs gave no breakdown of which products drove the jump in loans, or of what sat behind the bad-debt charges, so it is not yet clear how much of that switching has started.
