TymeBank, South Africa’s fastest growing digital bank is working out strategies for expanding its customer base. Many of their customers do not use smart phones for banking and belong to the low income category using feature phones. Now the firm has decided switch gears in a bid to triple its size by the end of 2020.
More than 70% of TymeBank’s customers earn R10 000 or less a month. They still use feature phones, forcing the TymeBank to build features that a digital bank does not typically think of, such as ability to use USSD codes to perform basic transactions. The result is that more than 40% of the customers after a transaction or two, stop using the digital transactions that the bank provides for. To address this challenge, the bank from next year onwards, will have brand ambassadors present at all Pick n Pay and Boxer kiosks all day to assist customers to teach them to use phones for transaction.
Owned by Patrice Motsepe’s African Rainbow Capital (ARC), the bank officially launched in April and attracted its first million customers in just seven months, thanks to its zero monthly fees. That has taken the South Africa bnaking system by surprise. With just over 40% of its new customers active, bank in 2020 is targeting to expand its base by empowering and acquainting them how to use the digital space for bank transactions regularly. It also targets at two million new customers it by the end of 2020. The bank is working out various strategies for increasing its customer base. Foremost is by increasing the number of its ambassadors to help customers to use the phones for transacting business deals. Secondly, it is also planning to increase its coverage of ambassadors and kiosks to other provinces. The bank is going to double the number of these individuals (ambassadors) in Gauteng, and later in other provinces as well, to help customers use the account.
The bank has two main competitors in the segment, which also target at low income people viz. Capitec and African Bank. The latter (African Bank) launched a new digital transactional account earlier this year. Therefore, the TymeBank feels that it has to deploy newer techniques to attract and to expand the customer base. On the top of it, African Bank has a huge network of branches and most of its account holders are opening accounts and operating them at branches. That presupposes TymeBank, which operates only on digital space to make its customers know how to operate accounts through digital space to retain and expand its customer base.
