The billionaire who built South Africa’s largest consumer bank

Michiel le Roux’s innovative approach to banking revolutionised the industry, propelling Capitec Bank to extraordinary success and establishing him as one of the wealthiest men in Africa.

According to Forbes, Le Roux’s net worth is $1.5 billion (R27.16 billion), making him one of the 20 wealthiest men in Africa.

Although the billionaire has a talent for banking, he didn’t initially foresee that this would be the industry in which he would ultimately thrive.

Born on 20 May 1949, Le Roux attended schools in various towns before matriculating in Alberton, owing to his father’s occupation as a mine ventilation engineer.

He studies at the University of Stellenbosch, where he graduated with a BCom (Law) and LLB degree.

He resided in Eendrag at the university, where he and the Chair of the Law Faculty Trust, Chris Otto, shared a room in his first year. Otto later founded the PSG Group.

After university, he started his career in the liquor industry, working at Distillers. He was eventually appointed managing director of the company, which became the largest wine and spirits company in South Africa in 1979. 

In 1994, he joined Boland Bank, a small regional bank in Cape Town’s hinterland. Christo Wiese, the chair, appointed him as managing director of the bank. Today, Wiese is better known as the director of Pep stores. 

Four years later, he resigned from this position, despite Wiese’s attempts to prevent him from leaving, which included making him a beneficiary in a share option scheme for which he would need to pay a calculated value if he left before the period expired.

His resignation, which came after a falling out about the future direction of the bank, cost him millions and led to a lawsuit between himself and Wiese, which dragged on for almost a year. 

This experience greatly informed his perspective on banking and what would soon become Capitec Bank. 

“I discovered at Boland Bank that banking was very archaic,” Le Roux said during an interview on 702.

One of the things that baffled him while at Boland Bank was the fact that banks closed at 15:30.

“I thought banks closed at that time because of some kind of law, but it turned out that there was no law that stated that.” 

“That was one of the things that I wanted to change. A lot of the staff was not happy about this. There were no hours when we started at Capitec, and we didn’t close until 15:30.”

Le Roux’s view of banking would go on to shake industry norms for years to come. 

Capitec

In 2001, Le Roux founded Capitec with co-founder Riaan Stassen, and the company listed on the JSE for the first time in February 2002.

The bank specifically targets South Africa’s emerging middle class. Previously, lower-income and disadvantaged South Africans were an untapped market of “the unbanked”, which traditional banks largely ignored. 

Le Roux served as chairman of the board of Capitec from 2007 to 2016 and has continued on as a board member. Today, he owns about 11% of the bank’s shares. 

“I told our shareholders we’ll either be a big success or a small failure. Not in my wildest dreams could I foresee the success we’ve had,” he told 702.

According to the group’s latest financial results, Capitec now has 866 branches, over 15,000 employees, and 22.2 million active clients. 

Capitec has ranked number one for outstanding disruption in financial services in the Africa Bank 4.0 Awards. It has also been ranked as the best bank in the world by Lafferty in 2016, the only bank out of hundreds to receive a five-star rating. 

The bank has often been hailed as the country’s most affordable bank and continues to disrupt the industry today through digitising its platform. 

According to the group’s financial results released in February, the bank’s transaction volumes increased by 21% to 9.9 billion for the year, and app users increased by 19% to 11.2 million.

“Our strategy has remained razor-focused on the future,” Gerrie Fourie, CEO of Capitec, said. 

“Over the last three years, we’ve invested R6.3 billion in re-platforming our systems and migrating our data to AWS Cloud services, developing innovative payment solutions, and building three new businesses to unlock value for our 22 million clients.”

“This cemented our position as the country’s top digital bank and produced strong results in a challenging economic environment.”

Political funding

Apart from Le Roux’s business endeavours, he has also made many large political contributions. 

According to the Electoral Commission’s latest quarterly political funding disclosure report, which covers the 2023/2024 financial year, the Democratic Alliance brought in the most donor funding of over R22 million.

The party’s largest donation, R15 million, came from Fynbos Ekwiteit, which lists Le Roux as its director.

Fynbos Ekwiteit has also made other significant donations to the DA over the last two financial years. From 2021 to 2023, the firm donated R65 million to the DA. 

In 2024, Le Roux donated R15 million to Change Starts Now, the first and only time he had donated to a party other than the DA. 

Le Roux denied that Capitec had any links with the DA. “Capitec does not fund any political parties,” he said to Sunday World.

He said it was his other companies, Fynbos Ekwiteit and Fynbos Kapital, that donated to the DA.

Le Roux’s role in the DA goes beyond donating millions, though. According to News24, he was part of a delegation that met with former DA leader Mmusi Maimane and asked him to consider resigning in the party’s best interests.

He was also the author of the report the DA commissioned after its electoral performance in 2019.