A banking licence is mostly a licence to borrow cheaply. Take deposits and you fund your lending with money customers have parked with you, which costs less than borrowing it first, and the gap is where a bank makes its living. That is what Pepkor, which owns PEP and Ackermans, is buying with PlusB, and it told the market on Monday the bank is still on track to open in the second half of its 2027 financial year.
What makes it unusual is the price. Pepkor says the whole build will come in below R1 billion, and management's own forecast in May put it at no more than R920 million in operating and capital spending combined before launch. Discovery is reckoned to have put about R15 billion into Discovery Bank over eight years before booking a first annual profit this June. Old Mutual's bank, which bought its core software off the shelf rather than writing its own, is costed at R2.8 billion.
The parts of a bank Pepkor already owns
Most of what a new bank spends money on is getting in front of people. Pepkor has 6,677 shops and 18 million members signed up to its +more rewards programme. It rents phones by the month to 2.6 million customers through FoneYam, and its Flash network of informal traders pushed R58.4 billion through in ten months.
The software it bought rather than built. Pepkor paid R224 million for a fintech called CloudBadger in October 2025, and that platform is believed to still run Standard Bank's operations in eSwatini. Merwe Scholtz, who started his career at Capitec in the late 1990s, has been named chief executive of the banking initiative, subject to the Prudential Authority approving him. Pepkor has held permission to establish a bank since November 2025 and filed its operational-readiness application in March; permission to actually take a deposit is the last one it needs.
Why Capfin is being wound down
Pepkor already lends. Capfin has done it for years, funded the way any non-bank lender funds itself, by borrowing the money first. The group is now deliberately writing less credit through Capfin so that future lending runs through PlusB instead, where deposits can pay for it. By 2032 it wants 1.8 million people banking with it as their main account, holding R8 billion on deposit and borrowing about as much back. That is also the year it expects to have earned back everything the bank loses getting started.
Three other companies are chasing the same customer at the same time. Old Mutual's bank went from 284,000 customers at the end of last year to past 950,000 by 9 September, while losing R764 million in the half to June. Sanlam has regulatory approval to start transactional banking in the first quarter of 2027, though it will distribute GoTyme's products rather than hold a licence of its own. Capitec already banks more than 26 million South Africans, and PlusB has still not been allowed to take its first deposit.
