{"id":153931,"date":"2017-01-31T11:25:13","date_gmt":"2017-01-31T09:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=153931"},"modified":"2017-01-31T11:34:40","modified_gmt":"2017-01-31T09:34:40","slug":"sa-post-offices-big-banking-move-set-for-mid-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/banking\/153931\/sa-post-offices-big-banking-move-set-for-mid-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"SA Post Office wants to be a bank by mid-2017"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The South African Post Office (Sapo) has submitted documents to Parliament indicating that it will apply to formalise its position as a fully-fledged bank by the middle of the year.<\/p>\n<p>According to <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/af.reuters.com\/article\/southAfricaNews\/idAFJ8N1F9000\">Reuters<\/a><\/strong>, Sapo said it woul\u00a0submit an application to register its financial services unit, Postbank, as a bank by July 3rd, 2017.<\/p>\n<p>In July 2016, the South African Reserve Bank (Sarb) gave Postbank the green light to pursue its banking goals by approving its application for a banking licence.<\/p>\n<p>Subsequent steps in the process involve the approval of the Postbank board nominees, the registration of the bank as a company and the transfer of business from Sapo to the new company.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking on the bank&#8217;s licence approval last year, minister of telecommunications Siyabonga Cwele said that the bank would not compete with South Africa&#8217;s other commercial banks, and will instead focus on pushing government&#8217;s development programmes.<\/p>\n<p>As a bank, it is expected to tap post office retail outlets across the country, turning them into branches. The Postbank is also set to become a subsidiary of Sapo but with its own governing structure.<\/p>\n<p>Postbank has R1.4 billion rand in excess capital, which is enough to meet regulatory minimum requirements for a bank, Reuters reported.<\/p>\n<p>To date, Postbank has served primarily as a deposit bank (savings bank), but legislation passed in 2010 allowed for the bank to offer transactional facilities.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>Read:\u00a0<a title=\"Permalink to SA Post Office a step closer to banking licence\" href=\"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/banking\/129618\/sa-post-office-a-step-closer-to-banking-licence\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">SA Post Office a step closer to banking licence<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The South African Post Office (Sapo) has submitted documents to Parliament indicating that it will apply to formalise its position as a fully-fledged bank by the middle of the year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":113828,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[961],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-153931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-banking","tag-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153931"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153945,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153931\/revisions\/153945"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}