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City Press reports that African Bank has completed its acquisition of prominent micro-lender Ubank after it announced that it was the successful bidder to purchase most of Ubank’s disclosed assets and liabilities.
The deal, which was finalised late in November, signifies a milestone in the African Bank’s revival strategy, which is geared toward a diversified business approach. Ubank (formerly known as Teba Bank) operates in the microfinance sector and mainly targets lower-income blue-collar workers, especially those in the mining sector. African Bank has not been a publicly held company since it went into curatorship in 2014. When it emerged out of curatorship in 2016, its shares went into the hands of the SA Reserve Bank, which invested R3 billion, along with a consortium of banks that helped back the bank in time of need. Chief executive officer Kennedy Bungane said the UBank transaction was an essential element to building a scalable and sustainable banking business with a compelling listable proposition. “Given Ubank’s strong retail deposits, transactional accounts, and partnerships with MTN’s Mobile Money, it will accelerate the diversification and scaling of African Bank in line with our mission to build a customer-centric, digital and data-enabled business,” he said. Bungane also advised: “Ubank’s customers will be migrated to African Bank’s MyWorld product, which offers a higher degree of personalisation, lower fees and more competitive value.”
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Mduduzi Nonyane at City Press (subscriber access only)
Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page