The upcoming court battle against Summit will not deter Capitec CEO Gerrie Fourie from his vision of building a bank for millions of South Africans seeking to fulfil their potential.
South Africa’s biggest provider of unsecured loans held its annual general meeting at Boschendal Wine Estate outside Cape Town on Friday, where Fourie revealed new plans to increase the size of the bank.
“We will build another 80 branches this year, bringing the total to 800 branches,” he said, adding that this was because 6.5 million customers still access their branches.
He said Capitec will also roll out 1 000 ATMs this year, taking the total to 3 000.
“There are four million South Africans who have secured finance,” he told shareholders. “We need to (give)... 55 million South Africans access to credit to enhance their lives by building homes and through education.”
One of South Africa's biggest banks, Capitec was recently crowned the best bank in the world by international banking advisory group Lafferty in its inaugural 2016 Bank Quality Rankings. Locally, the bank was ranked SA’s best bank for the fourth year running by the SA Customer Satisfaction Index - both in terms of how consumers experience its quality of service and in value for money offered.
Consumer watchdog Summit Financial Partners served papers on the bank earlier this month, through a high court application requesting the bank to provide consumer credit agreements based on the clients providing Summit permission to access the documents.In the second court case Summit is taking Capitec on over its multi loan practices, which it claims amounts to reckless lending. Summit CEO Clark Gardner told Fin24 that Capitec may be the best bank in the world for shareholders, but certainly not for the consumer."I suppose one must think that a lender who spends a fortune on building banking infrastructure yet manages to return over 54% to shareholders consistently year-on-year must be charging someone incredibly high margins... well that would be the consumer, who borrows from them," Gardner alleged.However, Fourie told shareholders that he is confident Capitec will win its case. “We do an adequate credit assessment and always check charge below the act requirements,” he said.“We are preparing ourselves for the case and taking it from there.”Fourie said the case has been "sensationalised in the media with material inaccuracies”.“There is no need to litigate through the media,” he said.Capitec’s 2015/16 earnings increased 26% from R2.5bn to R3.22bn, while headline earnings per share rose by 26% from R22.09 to R27.87.
The share price closed down 1.86% at R590.00 on Friday.
Fin24
