Who Owns Capitec Bank?

Capitec's roots are in the microlending businesses assembled by PSG Group, the Stellenbosch investment company founded by Jannie Mouton. In the late 1990s PSG consolidated micro-lenders including Smartfin and Finaid into a venture initially called Daxacom. Michiel le Roux, a former Boland Bank managing director who had also worked at Distell, was recruited to build a retail bank on top of that lending base. Riaan Stassen, another Boland Bank veteran, joined as a co-founder.

The business registered as a bank on 1 March 2001 and listed on the JSE as Capitec Bank Holdings on 18 February 2002. Le Roux served as founding CEO until 2004, when Stassen took over and led the bank through its defining growth years to 2013.

The founding proposition was radical simplicity: one transparent account, the Global One product, with a single fee structure marketed at South Africans neglected by the big four banks. Early years were hard, with slow deposit growth until about 2006. From there Capitec compounded relentlessly, overtaking Absa, Nedbank, Standard Bank, and FNB in customer numbers to become the country's largest bank by clients. A 2018 short-seller report by Viceroy Research caused a sharp but temporary share price fall; regulators and rating agencies defended the bank's accounting, and the share price recovered fully.

Under CEO Gerrie Fourie from 2014, Capitec diversified beyond unsecured lending into transactional banking, insurance, and business banking, acquiring Mercantile Bank in 2019 and launching the Capitec Connect MVNO in 2022. Graham Lee succeeded Fourie in 2023. For the year ended February 2026 the group reported headline earnings up 23 percent to R16.8 billion, a 31 percent return on equity, and more than 26 million active clients across 866 branches.