Patrice Motsepe’s TymeBank has chosen one of the founders to take over the helm after the resignation of CEO Sandile Shabalala four months after its public launch.
Tauriq Keraan, who has been with the bank since its inception in 2012 (initially as the fintech company Tyme Digital), said he has no intention of changing anything as he was part of the team that constructed the strategy that helped TymeBank get noticed the way it did despite being a new player in a space dominated by a few big players.
The latest Prudential Authority report, released in June, showed that the big four banks and Capitec still command 90.5% of market share, despite the entry of four new banks in the past year. Still, TymeBank has managed to sign up more than 600,000 clients since its official launch in February.
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“Prior to my role as the deputy CEO, I was actually head of strategy for TymeBank. So I was the guy that developed the strategy and sold it to the board,” said Keraan.
A big part of his role as deputy CEO to Shabalala has been to drive execution of TymeBank's strategy in different parts of the bank's operations, he said. This has given him hands-on experience on how every function in the business works.
Kerran, like his predecessor, said he would not be reacting to the constant revamping of competitors’ products since TymeBank entered the market.
“Our preoccupation now is really to execute on our original strategy, which is to deliver financial inclusion to ordinary South Africans. We still have two focuses — the underserved consumers and small businesses,” he said.
Keraan said while there was no need for a strategic change, since TymeBank was still a new business in a highly concentrated sector, there were lessons that may require it to rethink and respond to certain developments.
A matter the bank is considering is how to get dormant accounts active. One idea for increasing customer activity is to convert more than 600,000 customers on the bank's money-sending platform into bank customers.
Keraan said the bank was not worried about the number of people who have not used their accounts given the notoriously high proportion of users who tend to be dormant when something was easy to acquire and cost nothing. He said the bank has observed that many new account holders have no activity for the first month or two and then start transacting with the card three months later.
“It's unlikely that we will have incredibly high activation rates at the point of onboarding. But 40%, I'm actually pleased by it because these digital banking deployments, particularly mobile money, if you just leave it in the market to grow organically, activity rates are significantly lower.”
Keraan's passion for financial inclusion started long before he embarked on his journey with TymeBank.
When he was working for Deloitte, he became a consultant for Standard Bank, which was trying to establish a community banking business to serve low-income earners at the time. After a number of years consulting for that business, he started what would later become Tyme Digital, a fintech company which originally sought to design and operate a mobile money service for MTN.
TymeBank's parent company, African Rainbow Capital, said Keraan's experience in the bank and in the industry made him the right candidate to implement the bank's strategy successfully.
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