ROB ROSE: The bank no-one saw coming
A new report into bank fees shows that Capitec is the cheapest bank by miles — and some of its competitors have tried to copy what it’s doing
A few weeks before the financial crisis hit banks across the world in 2008, Judge Thabani Jali released a much-awaited report into whether SA’s banks were competing with each other as hard as they claimed. It would be fair to say the findings of Jali’s panel, which heard testimony from banks and civil society groups for months at the competition tribunal, were not exactly popular in banks’ boardrooms. Specifically this assessment: "[Banks] in SA operate not as a cartel but rather as oligopolists that maximise their profits by avoiding outright price competition where they can, and by taking advantage of the degree to which customers, once recruited, become locked into a particular bank." Jali’s report talked of how the market for personal transactional accounts was "highly concentrated" within the big four banks, with "barriers to entry by additional firms" being high. Nor did he hold out much hope of change. "Fringe players", such as Capitec, hadn’t "posed a serious competitive thr...
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