With just four years of experience and 7 million customers under its belt, retail banking company TymeBank is gearing up to continue pushing boundaries in the sector and giving customers a bank they can trust.
Cheslyn Jacobs, the Chief Commercial Officer at TymeBank, said TymeBank had historically pushed the boundaries across multiple facets of the industry, and it was something they were proud of, especially because they had made accessing or opening a bank account easy for ordinary citizens..
Jacobs said they were especially proud that they had brought in real affordable banking and created real value for customers by reducing typical bank fees, or increasing what they got from a regular bank.
“Providing real value is important to us. We want customers to experience us as completely different to what they have experienced before.’’
To this end, Jacobs said the company had made a considerable investment in their ground service environment, particularly through providing a platform for young people to start their professional lives.
Currently, TymeBank employs 1 100 ambassadors to work alongside their kiosks located at the various retail stores, including Pick n Pay, Boxer, and others, to help customers throughout the process and share information about how it works and how it can benefit them.
In fact, Jacobs said that the ambassadors accounted for 80% of all the bank’s new business, followed suit by their digital platforms.
“Roughly 90% to 95% of our ambassadors have indicated that these are their very first jobs, and with the youth unemployment, we think it’s a conscience step where we are happy to give them a chance as we also make an investment in their training.“
For this, they work closely with youth accelerator programmes to source young people across the country and give them work opportunities.
However, Jacobs stressed that localisation was very important in providing these work opportunities to the youth as they wanted to ensure that they did not have the ambassadors having to catch more than one taxi to get to work.
“We know what having to travel long distances for work does to access, what it does to people’s income, the more they have to travel. That is why we localise our recruitment, and ambassadors must be from the area, know the community, and must speak the language.
“Banking has always been complicated and a pain, and we want to speak a language customers can understand, and our ambassadors play an important role in that regard,“ he added.
In the past four years, he said the company had employed 4 000 ambassadors.
In terms of growth, Jacobs said they were also excited about the company’s latest acquisition of Retail Company as it was a company that offered loans to start-ups and small SMMEs, which he said were crucial to the country’s development and the economy at large moving forward.
And while he stressed that growing the business and offering more products were at the top of their list, they wanted to assure customers that considerable investment had been made to address fraud.
According to statistics from the Southern African Fraud Prevention Service (SAFPS), there was a 600% increase in incidents of fraud reported by their members in 2022 when compared to 2018.
‘’We’ve made a considerable investment in preventing fraud, and you have to continue to keep abreast because criminals are constantly changing their modus operandi all the time. These guys are smart and work alongside other institutions, but we’ve built a lot of intelligence to understand them at a customer level.
“We run social media campaigns, send customers emails, and even host events on Twitter spaces, where we interact with customers with the head of fraud to share with people to look out for. We are trying to close that knowledge gap behind the scenes while at the same time educating our customers on how they can keep safe as something like losing money can be traumatising.”