Capitec’s newest challenger doubled its customers in six months

OM Bank more than doubled its customer base to 742,000, less than a year after its public launch in September 2025. 

This has previously been done largely by migrating Old Mutual Money Account holders over to the new banking offering.

However, in Old Mutual’s interim results for the six-month period ending 30 June, it revealed that half of its new transactional sign-ups are entirely new clients. 

This makes OM Bank a significant growth engine for the broader group and shows that the offering is attractive to new clients. 

The bank is scaling rapidly as it looks to break even in the 2028 financial year, which it estimates will require a customer base of 2.8 million. 

This is a demanding ask for the bank run by Clarence Nethengwe, with this growth rate roughly matching Capitec’s. 

OM Bank has made no secret of where it wants to play in the market, with it looking to leverage Old Mutual’s historic dominance of the mass market in South Africa. 

This is also partly to defend its insurance business from Capitec, which has rapidly rolled out a funeral insurance offering through its banking app. 

OM Bank said in the latest results that it is targeting South Africa’s mass and middle-income segments, particularly individuals earning between R8,000 and R80,000 per month. 

It further clarified that its offering will be anchored on customers earning between R15,000 and R50,000 per month – the market dominated by Capitec. 

OM Bank is gaining traction in this market, adding around 3,000 customers a day and seeing its deposits surge to R1.38 billion.

This will provide it with a strong retail funding base to support future lending growth as it consolidates products once offered through Old Mutual Finance. 

These offerings are dominated by unsecured lending. But, crucially, Old Mutual Banking is growing its secured lending book strongly. 

Secured lending refers to home loans and investment-backed lending, which is far less risky for banks and, thus, more lucrative. This book jumped 21% to R1.53 billion. 

OM Bank said it has soft-launched app-based lending offerings in early 2026, which will be scaled in the second half of the year. 

As the bank expands its product set, it hopes to drive higher transactional activity and engagement, which generates vital non-interest revenue. 

This revenue is highly lucrative as it is not capital-intensive like lending activities. 

OM Bank posted an operational loss of R764 million in the first half of the 2026 financial year, in line with its R1.1 billion to R1.3 billion forecasted loss for the year. 

The bank is expected to continue running losses on this scale for the next three financial years, before breaking even in 2028. 

Old Mutual has allocated R2 billion to be invested into OM Bank over 2026 and 2027 to fund its scaling efforts. 

The low-hanging fruit for OM Bank remains Old Mutual’s seven million customers in South Africa and its 7,753 tied advisers.