African Bank says it plans to list on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange by 2025. The bank released its annual financial results for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2022.
It has recorded a nearly 40% jump in profitability as it continues to expand its transactional base. It’s also hopeful about recent acquisition moves in buying up traditional mining bank Ubank and small business bank, Grindrod.
African Bank says it saw a significant rise in loan advances, reporting that net customer advances rose by 38% to R22.65 billion. It records healthy growth in its retail savings and investment deposits portfolio.
While market analysts have raised concerns for retail banks in a climate of higher interest rates, this latest result was welcomed.
“They’re making a very serious inroad when it comes to the retail market, retail loan disbursement, up 87 %, look at their retail savings, up 15%, that’s kinda impressive,” says Chief Investment Officer, Makwe Fund Managers, Makwe Masilela.
In the period under review, African Bank made significant acquisitions in its bid to diversify its revenue streams. It believes it can multiply the value in Ubank, a traditionally mining sector bank, which it acquired as well as the Grindrod Bank, which largely caters to entrepreneurs – a market the Bank says remains highly underserved.
“Grindrod is a successful commercial bank in business banking, largely in KZN and Gauteng. We want to give them wings and support them with our much stronger balance sheet to grow the customer base they have currently, but in addition to that bolt onto the Grindrod rails that will find a digital SME offering that allows us to support entrepreneurs much better in this economy,” says CEO of African Bank, Kennedy Bungane.
African Bank which resumed full operations in 2016 following being placed under curatorship in 2014 says it will be undertaking processes to empower its current staff and stakeholders as early as next year.
“We aim to have a prelisting sometime in 2023 – hopefully by the end of 2023 which would allow for all of our colleagues to be early takers of shareholding at African Bank and also those strategic holder partners that are integral to our ability to implement our strategy,” Bungane adds.
The Bank is hoping to open up share ownership to investment institutions and the general public through an initial public offering on the JSE by 2025.
