There are self-service kiosks going into the corner of Sanlam's walk-in branches, and they do not belong to Sanlam. They belong to GoTyme, the digital lender majority-owned by Patrice Motsepe's African Rainbow Capital Investments, which is also a shareholder in Sanlam itself. From the first quarter of 2027 Sanlam will be selling its clients a bank account, and GoTyme will be the bank behind it. Regulators signed that arrangement off last week.
The division of labour is the whole design. GoTyme does the banking, Sanlam does the distribution, and the two of them share what it makes, which is why the sign-off was the thing worth announcing. Rivals took the long road. Old Mutual built its own bank in 2025 and had 742,000 customers a year later, while Discovery started its lender in 2019 and posted a first full-year profit only this June. Sanlam has skipped the building part.
What it will sell you, and what it will not
The pitch is not a new current account for the country. It is aimed at people already on Sanlam's books, a spread the group describes as running from nurses, policemen and teachers through to the wealthiest households in South Africa. What they get is cheaper fees, better interest on deposits, credit including loans and eventually cards, and a rewards programme running through the Sanlam app. GoTyme's low running costs are what is meant to pay for the better savings rate.
Home loans are out. Sanlam sold that business to Absa in 2010, and chief executive Paul Hanratty rates mortgages among the least attractive things a lender can write, with heavy upfront costs and margins he calls very thin. Business banking is out too. Banks, he told News24, are traditionally "where you send money to die".
The number that moved the share price
None of that is what the market reacted to on results day. Adjusted headline earnings for the six months to June fell 22%, to R7.7 billion, and the causes were weather, currency and markets rather than anything a customer did. Severe flooding in January and May drove R875 million of claims across South Africa. A firmer rand shrank the translated value of everything Sanlam earns beyond it, and bond and equity markets in Morocco and India gave back a strong prior year.
Underneath the headline number the business grew. New business volumes rose by well over a fifth, to R224 billion. Client cash flows came in 42% higher on a comparable basis. Core earnings, the measure Sanlam uses to decide what it can pay out as a dividend, edged up 1%.
The soft launch to staff and advisers comes in November, ahead of the public rollout early next year. Hanratty has told investors that getting the credit venture behind it running has gone slower than he would have liked.
