South African discount retailer Pepkor Holdings has received regulatory approval to establish a banking presence, it said on Tuesday, as it expands beyond retail and financial services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pepkor said in a statement that it had secured approval from the Prudential Authority in November, enabling it to enter South Africa’s competitive banking sector.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The company said the move is supported by its acquisition of fintech software provider Cloudbadger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The platform that we acquired\u2026and the team that comes with that is actually a key ingredient to developing this opportunity,” Group CEO Pieter Erasmus told investors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
“So we think that has put us in a very good position.” Pepkor plans to announce details of its offering and target customers in March.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n South African retailers such as Shoprite, which has expanded banking services, and Pick n Pay, which offers in-store banking through Tymebank, are also exploring new revenue streams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pepkor will compete in a highly competitive sector dominated by Standard Bank, FirstRand’s First National Bank, Absa, Nedbank and Capitec Bank.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Earlier, Pepkor, which owns the PEP and Ackermans clothing brands, said headline earnings per share (HEPS) from continuing operations rose 14.8% to 161 cents in the year ended September 30, from 140.2 cents a year ago. Normalised HEPS grew 23.4% to 161 cents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The group’s fintech segment grew by 31.1% to 16.6 billion rand ($960 million), driven by 61.4% growth in financial services and a 13.7% rise in Flash, its informal market platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Group revenue climbed 12% to 95.3 billion rand while the clothing and general merchandise business grew 8.9% to 66.9 billion rand. The furniture, appliances and electronics segment increased by 7.2%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" South African discount retailer Pepkor Holdings has received regulatory approval to establish a banking presence, it said on Tuesday, as it expands beyond retail and financial services.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":843824,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[961],"tags":[10335,4076],"class_list":["post-844505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-banking","tag-banking","tag-pepkor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844505","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\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=844505"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":844507,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844505\/revisions\/844507"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/843824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=844505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=844505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=844505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}