Capitec aims to grow credit card book to R10bn by 2021

Within five years, Capitec would like to have grown its credit card book to R10 billion, or 10% of the local R100 billion credit card book market, according to Capitec CEO Gerrie Fourie.

Currently, 22.4% of the banked population uses Capitec as its primary bank.

On September 15, Capitec launched a credit card, with a monthly fee of R50, at its 150 branches in the Western Cape.

A small advantage of the card is that if you have a cash balance, you earn 5.35% interest on that cash.

Fourie said that the Capitec credit card was not aggressively priced, but was “priced in the middle range”.

“We are now going to launch in the rest of the country,” he said.

Being a new product, Capitec needed to better understand the behaviour and risk associated with running a credit card, and the debut of the card came amid tough economic times, Fourie said.

The Capitec credit card was likely to break even within six months, he said.

Following the launch in the Western Cape, there had been a take-up of about 100 credit cards per day, so more than 1 000 of the cards had probably been issued so far.

Capitec had not spent any money on advertising the credit card and it had been growing via word of mouth, Fourie said. “We had a low-key start to the product,” he said.

Capitec put the maximum limit on its credit card at R50 000, but this would increase once the product had settled down, Fourie said.