Billionaire Motsepe-backed bank makes all employees shareholders

GoTyme Bank has invited all its employees to share ownership in the digital lender controlled by South African billionaire Patrice Motsepe as it seeks to scale up operations.

Africa’s first profitable standalone digital bank, this week, extended the offer to its 2 000-strong global employee base across all levels of the company and started sessions to educate staff about the new incentive and its potential benefits.

“We want our staff to behave like owners,” Chief Executive Officer Cheslyn Jacobs said on the sidelines of an event in Johannesburg Thursday night. “This business still is in a hyper-growth phase, so we think this is going to make meaningful differences to our people’s lives.”

Majority owned by Motsepe’s African Rainbow Capital Investments, GoTyme Bank has more than 21 million customers in South Africa and the Philippines, where it runs a joint venture with the Gokongwei Group. It’s also backed by China’s Tencent Holdings and has operations in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Vietnam and Singapore.

The lender was valued $1.5 billion in 2024 after a fundraising round that included a $150 million investment from Latin America’s most valuable financial company, Nu Holdings.

Jacobs declined to share an updated valuation, saying instead that the business would post a record profit for the year through June and is signing up about 450 000 new clients per month across South Africa and the Philippines.

While GoTyme is still working toward listing to further fuel its growth, its internal narrative around such a move has changed, Jacobs said.

“We’ve publicly said we want to do this before the next decade, but we do talk about it slightly differently now,” he said. “What we’ve realised is you struggle to predict these things, so now we talk about being listing-ready from a timeline perspective in three to four years from now. But we’re only going to do it if it makes sense.”

The lender would consider a listing anywhere globally closer to when it reaches 50 million clients and with “the right kind of valuation,” Jacobs said.

“The last number was $1.5 billion — 10x it. It would be lovely to list at $15 billion. Wouldn’t that be amazing?” he said.

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