Sanlam made its name as an insurance group, and now it wants your everyday bank account as well. At its capital markets day last week, the group told investors it is aiming for 2 million to 4 million banking clients by 2030, starting with a new Sanlam app that soft-launches in November. The full commercial launch follows in 2027.
The bank inside that app is not Sanlam's. GoTyme, the lender backed by Patrice Motsepe, provides the accounts under its own licence, and Sanlam's job is distribution: putting those accounts in front of people who already hold its policies. Motsepe also happens to be Sanlam's single largest shareholder. Lending already runs through a 50/50 joint operation between the two companies.
That is a different road from the one Old Mutual took. It applied for, and got, a banking licence of its own, and launched OM Bank in 2025. Sanlam skips that step and leans on what it already has: more than 10 million clients, over 9,400 tied advisers and 163 branches.
What it costs to get people to switch
None of this is cheap, and Sanlam put the bill on a slide. It has spent R180 million on everyday banking so far and expects to spend another R150 million to R200 million a year from here, with banking not breaking even until 2030. Lending is the part that already makes money. Its unsecured loan book stood at R6 billion in 2025, and the target is to almost double that by 2030.
Customers who already bank somewhere else
The hard part is getting people to move. Most of Sanlam's clients already have a transactional account at another bank, a banking analyst told The Money Show, so Sanlam will have to win them over on price, rewards and what it pays on savings. Capitec's app is the benchmark any newcomer has to beat. And Standard Bank, Absa, FNB and Nedbank, which still hold more than 80% of the sector's assets, are upping their payments game to keep their customers where they are.
Sanlam is also late. Discovery Bank has been signing people up since 2019 and has just under 1.6 million clients. OM Bank had 742,000 by the end of June, and Pepkor, with more than 30 million customers, is expected to launch its own bank in 2027. Even the bottom of Sanlam's range would put it ahead of where Discovery Bank is today.
Anton Gildenhuys, who runs Sanlam Life and Savings, put the move down to a market that has shifted under it. "We lead today, but the market has evolved, and we are adapting," he said. The first line on management's own dashboard for 2027 is the plainest measure there is: accounts opened.
