Pepkor doesn’t need to build trust in South Africa’s poorest communities. It already owns the checkout counter.
Image: Henk Kruger / Independent Newspapers
PEPKOR doesn’t need to build trust in South Africa’s poorest communities. It already owns the checkout counter.
Across much of the country, a bank branch is rarely the first sign of formal commerce. It’s the blue-and-white PEP sign. Long before fibre arrives, before stable jobs materialise, before the language of “financial inclusion” reaches policy documents, Pep stores are already there selling school uniforms, airtime, blankets, and dignity on lay-by. In many towns, they are not just retailers. They are infrastructure.
Now Pepkor wants to turn that checkout counter into a bank.
This is not a side experiment. It is a retail giant, deeply embedded in low-income life, stepping into the most intimate terrain of survival: how people save, borrow, pay, and endure.
It enters prepared. Capfin loans, Flash payments in the informal economy, A+ and Connect retail credit, insurance, device rentals through FoneYam, and digital rewards have already built a dense financial ecosystem.
Fintech revenue has surged to R16.6 billion, growing faster than the rest of the business. Regulatory approval has been secured. A banking licence is no longer speculative. It is operational.
The question is no longer whether Pepkor can become a bank. It is what kind of bank it will choose to be.
Optimists see disruption. South Africa’s banking sector has long been dominated by scale-heavy incumbents that feel distant, rigid, and expensive to those least able to absorb costs. A player embedded in everyday transactions could lower barriers, simplify products, and widen access.
If Pepkor can replicate something like Capitec’s early discipline, transparent pricing, products designed for irregular incomes, and credit that recognises informal work, it could force the system to become more humane.
But access is not the same as fairness.
South Africa does not merely lack banks. It lacks just one. For millions, finance feels punitive: fees quietly erode small balances, products resist comparison, and credit is easy to access but painful to repay. The poor do not lack participation. They pay the highest price for it.
Pepkor’s advantage is different. Traditional banks are built on infrastructure and compliance. Pepkor built on proximity.
It has spent years observing the real economy as it is lived: lay-by as enforced saving, airtime as microcurrency, and store credit as a bridge between instability and survival. It understands patterns that formal finance often ignores.
That proximity is power. And power, at scale, does not stay neutral. Two futures now sit behind the same counter.
In one, Pepkor does what few institutions have managed: it designs finance around reality. Pricing that can be explained in a single sentence at the till. Savings tools that work with irregular income, not against it. Credit scoring that treats informal earnings as a signal, not noise. Products that reduce fragility instead of feeding on it.
With millions already transacting through its stores, it could scale humane finance faster than any incumbent ever has.
But there is another path, and it is the easier one.
Pepkor Bank could become high-margin micro-lending dressed in friendly branding. It could bundle products in ways customers cannot easily untangle. It could perfect collections, optimise dependency, and turn behavioural data into a machine for extraction.
At that point, it would not be disrupting the system. It would be perfect.
When one company sells the uniform, tops up the airtime, extends the credit, processes the payment, and then becomes the bank, it is no longer participating in a market. It is shaping one.
And power rarely gives discounts.
This is the test South Africa should apply. Not how fast Pepkor rolls out banking. Not how many accounts it opens. But whether its scale widens fairness or simply deepens monetisation.
Because access without fairness is not inclusion. It is just a more efficient way to charge people for being poor.
Pepkor already holds something the major banks envy: trust built through thousands of small, reliable transactions in familiar places. But retail trust is not financial trust. One is built on affordability and convenience. The other demands clarity, restraint, and, above all, limits on how much can be taken.
That second trust must be earned from scratch.
South Africans are no longer asking to be included in the financial system. They are asking not to be punished by it. If Pepkor understands that, it could redraw the map of banking in this country. If it doesn’t, it won’t have transformed finance.
It will simply have moved the checkout counter into people’s wallets and called it progress.
* Nyaniso Qwesha is a writer with a background in risk management, governance, and sustainability. He explores how power, accountability, and innovation intersect in South Africa’s landscape.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, IOL, or Independent Media.