The woman who went from selling chillies and mopane worms on a street corner to running Standard Bank’s R58 billion personal banking giant

Standard Bank Personal and Private Banking (PPB) CEO Funeka Montjane once made money by selling chillies and mopane worms on a street corner.

This was how Montjane earned pocket money, inspired by her grandmother, who sold vetkoek to make a living. 

Montjane shared this story as part of the Standard Bank Talks series, where she interviewed informal economy expert GG Alcock on the first episode. 

Alcock explained that many people do not understand the scale of the informal economy, despite engaging with the businesses on a micro level. 

While people and financial institutions can understand a person renting out back rooms for extra cash, they do not grasp that the sector is worth R30 billion. 

Montjane said that she did not grapple with how big the informal economy is until she became an executive at Standard Bank, and the data made it clear. 

“When I grew up, my grandmother used to sell amagwinya, and I just understood it as a way to make extra money,” Montjane said. 

“The first time I had a business, I must have been five years old, copying my grandmother and selling chillies and mopane worms so that I could have pocket money.”

“I didn’t think of it as economic activity and a business. What has been a real surprise is just how big these businesses are. They are not subsistence businesses. They can be really large entities.” 

Montjane has come a long way since selling chillies and mopane worms on a street corner, having climbed the ranks at Standard Bank. 

She now finds herself at the top of an extremely large organisation as the CEO of Standard Bank PPB, one of the bank’s four business units. 

Some have also tipped her to replace the group CEO, Sim Tshabalala, when he retires from the top job at Africa’s biggest bank at the end of 2027. 

From selling chillies to CFO 

Montjane climbed the ranks at Standard Bank quickly after graduating from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2000 with a Bachelor of Commerce Honours degree. 

As with many banking executives in South Africa, Montjane is a qualified chartered accountant (CA), despite not initially being interested in this qualification. 

Montjane recalled at a Wits Alumni event that she was drawn to the profession after reading a news article detailing how much a chartered accountant can earn.

At the time, her grandmother earned a salary of R100, and Montjane was in a school where only one or two pupils passed matric. 

A more serious challenge was that Montjane was not good at mathematics, which is vital for studying accounting. 

She remembers wanting to quit mathematics because it was so challenging, but her grandmother would not let her. 

Instead, she doubled down and arranged for Montjane to have a tutor to improve her academic performance and ensure she could earn a distinction in matric and pursue a career in accounting. 

“My path to becoming a CA began in grade 7 when I first read about its existence. The journey was challenging, but I had a supportive environment, from my grandmother to my first manager, who helped me along the way,” she said. 

Montjane qualified as a CA while working at PwC, where she rose to partner in the early 2000s. Standard Bank soon came calling, and its mission to drive Africa’s growth made it an attractive option. 

The bank offered Montjane the role of CFO in its PPB South Africa business, which she accepted. 

The mandate was demanding for Montjane, as it included appointments as head of home loans and head of credit. It was a baptism by fire in the banking world. 

However, this gave her valuable experience in running a banking operation and exposed her to how Standard Bank managed credit risk. 

The home loans business is particularly important for Standard Bank, as it finances a third of all homes in South Africa. To this day, that is a point of pride for Montjane. 

The rise to CEO of PPB South Africa in 2012 would not be the end of Montjane’s ascent, as Standard Bank’s creation of a business-unit-led restructuring provided new opportunities. 

Running Standard Bank’s PPB unit

In 2021, Montjane was appointed as CEO of Standard Bank’s PPB cluster, which includes all its personal banking offerings in Africa. 

This business plays a key role in the bank’s future, as it seeks to dominate private banking across the continent as its population grows wealthier and economies expand.

Its main competitors in this space are not its traditional Big Four peers of Absa, FirstRand (FNB), and Nedbank, but rather large multinationals. 

These institutions, such as Barclays and Standard Chartered, among others, tend to bank Africa’s wealthiest individuals by offering offshore banking services.

While these banks are large and established institutions, Montjane is at the head of a giant in its own right. 

Standard Bank’s PPB unit is often overlooked in favour of the bank’s prestigious Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) crown jewel. 

While the CIB division generates the majority of Standard Bank’s headline earnings, the personal banking franchise is just as indispensable. 

In the bank’s most recent full-year results, Montjane’s unit generated headline earnings of R11.4 billion. For context, Capitec’s business posted headline earnings of R13.8 billion in 2025. 

Montjane’s unit is also one of the bank’s most efficient, despite its exposure to relatively higher risk, such as unsecured lending and credit cards. 

It also lacks the luxury of being fee- and commission-rich, as the bank’s CIB unit, which benefits from client trading, forex, and its global markets business. 

Standard Bank’s PPB unit posted a return on equity of 23.3% in 2025, which is above the bank’s 2028 target range of 18% to 22%. 

Perhaps most importantly, the unit plays a crucial role in unlocking the lucrative growth of Standard Bank’s insurance and asset management (IAM) business. 

One of the key areas of growth for the IAM business, which includes Liberty, is cross-selling insurance products into the PPB client base. 

In this sense, the PPB unit has created a significant pool in which Standard Bank’s other units can sell products and increase activity. 

IAM is lucrative for a bank, providing annuity-type income that is capital efficient, unlike typical banking activities. 

The dominance of private banking in Africa and the facilitation of IAM growth in South Africa are key focus areas for Montjane in the coming years. 

In the next few years, it is possible that Montjane will continue her rise at Standard Bank and replace Tshabalala in the top job.