Sanlam intends to enter South Africa’s transactional banking market in the first quarter of 2027, using a partnership with GoTyme Bank rather than building or buying its own banking licence. The insurer has already secured regulatory approval to offer transactional banking services through the arrangement and says it is now working through a handful of remaining deliverables, including Apple Pay functionality, before a phased rollout begins.
The rollout sequence starts close to home: Sanlam staff, then its network of intermediaries, then existing Sanlam clients, will gain access before the services are opened to the broader market. A soft launch is pencilled in for 1 November 2026, ahead of the fuller first-quarter 2027 expansion. The retail credit joint venture underpinning the tie-up, aimed at lending products with cross-selling potential into Sanlam’s existing client base, was established with GoTyme in June 2026.
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GoTyme Bank is the rebranded name for what was TymeBank, and has set itself the goal of becoming a top-three retail bank across all metrics within five years, with a mass-market focus. Sanlam chief executive Paul Hanratty has argued that building a comparable digital platform from scratch would not have given the group the same competitive edge or speed to market, framing the partnership route as a way to draw on GoTyme’s existing digital infrastructure and client reach without taking on the capital and regulatory burden of running a bank outright. Both groups are also partially owned by Patrice Motsepe’s investment vehicles, which has smoothed the structuring of the deal.
| Bank | Reported customer base | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Capitec | ~26 million clients | Cumulative, as reported 2026 |
| GoTyme Bank (app) | 4 million+ users | July 2026 |
| Old Mutual Bank | Nearing 1 million | September 2026 |
| Sanlam + GoTyme combined | ~17 million | Cited for the 2027 partnership |
The planned combined app will bundle savings, transfers, bill payments, data and electricity purchases, and credit applications, with a shared loyalty and rewards programme intended to tie the ecosystem together. Sanlam frames the initiative as part of its “Winning-as-One” strategy, aimed at deepening client relationships across its insurance and financial services businesses and opening new revenue lines, rather than as a stand-alone banking push.
The move puts Sanlam into an already crowded field. Capitec, the dominant player, has grown to roughly 26 million clients, a base it says now rivals Standard Bank, Absa and Discovery Bank combined, and its app alone counts 15.3 million active users. Old Mutual took the opposite route to Sanlam, building its own OM Bank rather than partnering, and is nearing the one-million-customer mark. Discovery Bank continues to grow more slowly but has been gaining ground on customer deposits, while Pep Bank, and the traditional big four of FNB, Absa, Nedbank and Standard Bank, round out a market Sanlam will be entering from a standing start on the transactional side.
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GoTyme itself has been cited with two different customer figures worth distinguishing: just over 4 million people had adopted its rebranded app as of July 2026, while a separate figure of 12 million relates to the cumulative reach of its decade-long technology partnership with payments provider BPC, a different and longer-running measure that should not be read as today’s active customer count. GoTyme was named Africa’s best digital bank at the 2026 Euromoney awards, a credential that will lend some credibility to Sanlam’s bet as it prepares to lean on GoTyme’s infrastructure rather than build its own.
With the partnership targeting a combined Sanlam-GoTyme customer base of about 17 million once fully rolled out, the success of the venture will depend less on acquiring new customers from scratch and more on converting Sanlam’s existing insurance and investment clients into active transactional banking users, a conversion rate that has proven difficult for several of its established rivals to predict this early in a rollout.