SA’s financial services groups are increasingly teaming up with mega churches looking to tap into a potential base running into millions of members and entrenched loyalties to their denominations.
The strategy is clear: partner with the country’s largest and most influential churches and have them as a base to launch products. Early signs of these partnerships, rare in other parts of the world, seem to be a golden goose for the financial services groups that have embarked on this path.
Companies such as TymeBank, one of SA’s fastest-growing banks, and Metropolitan Life have made inspired choices on which churches they partner with to roll out their products: Zion Christian Church (ZCC) and Nazareth Baptist (Shembe) Church.
The history of the two churches stretches back a century, accounting for about 17-million members between them.
For TymeBank, backed by Patrice Motsepe, its partnership with ZCC, with its 12-million members across the country, got off to a slow start disrupted by Covid-19. However, the partnership, first forged in 2020 before the pandemic brought economic activity to a near standstill, has now taken off.
TymeBank is essentially enticing millions of ZCC members to adopt the digital-only bank as their lender of choice, offering those who take up its product an element of exclusivity and low fees.
Cheslyn Jacobs, chief commercial officer at TymeBank, said given the vast ZCC membership base, the lender has made special infrastructural arrangements, including the rollout of roaming kiosks at more church sites across five provinces.
“We have roughly 100 church sites equipped with TymeBank’s ZCC-branded kiosks to allow customers to open accounts at their places of worship in major centres and in smaller rural villages across the country,” Jacobs said. “The ZCC-branded kiosks are staffed by trained agents from Zetnet Mobile, a mobile and digital services company owned by the church.”
TymeBank capitalised on this year’s Easter festivities at ZCC’s headquarters in the Limpopo province, Moriah, which houses the largest Christian gathering in SA, to cement the partnership.
It was the first time since the partnership was inked four years ago that TymeBank hosted activations for the Easter period at Moriah — and there was good uptake of TymeBank products and services.
“TymeBank successfully completed the pilot phase of the Zion City Moria (ZCM) Membership Card and to date has onboarded more than 300,000 church members as customers,” Jacobs said.
TymeBank has grown to more than 10-million customers since going to market in 2019.
The ZCM card works as both the official church membership card and a bank debit card exclusively for ZCC members. The card also offers ZCC members best-in-market transactional banking fees and up to 10% in interest on savings balances, according to TymeBank.
Jacobs said the lender believes the ZCM Membership Card offers attractive benefits. “The convenience of being able to open accounts in their community, assisted by their fellow members, as well as the empowerment of simple and transparent products and the direct financial benefits of the low transactional fees and high savings rates speak to the needs of the ZCC members.”
Metropolitan Life, an asset in Momentum Group’s armour, has taken notice of the opportunities for client acquisition that teaming with a mega church brings.
To this end, the insurer has teamed up with the Shembe Church in a tie-up that will initially introduce a customised funeral insurance product, specifically co-created to meet church members’ cultural and religious needs.
Beyond the initial phase, which will offer cash payouts for claims, Metropolitan Life aims to introduce comprehensive funeral management services that will assist bereaved families in conducting ceremonies that adhere to Shembe traditions.
The church, founded in 1910, is one of SA’s largest with a membership said to be about 8-million.
Metropolitan Life CEO Peter Tshiguvho earlier this year visited one of the Shembe churches to get a feel of what the church is about.
“We are going to be utilising the current distribution channel to penetrate this market. What really excites me about this partnership is that this is a different kind of client. We have to learn as much as possible from this particular grouping,” Tshiguvho said at Momentum’s capital market day.
“We are not going to get someone outside to go sell there. We want the church members to be the ones selling among themselves. This will be a totally different revenue stream for us.”
Metropolitan Life is expected to share more details when it takes its tailor-made products for Shembe Church members to market in the coming months.
Momentum’s Namibian business has taken a similar route with the launch of the Elcin Funeral Plan, a purpose-built funeral cover product offered exclusively to members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. The church is said to have about 500,000 members.
How successful these partnerships will be in driving long-term shareholder value growth remains to be seen. However, what is clear is that financial services groups are looking at mega churches as centres to draw in new clients, taking to market innovative products and favourable pricing as a value add.
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