CEO Gerrie Fourie exits Capitec, ready to grab new opportunities

In 2000, Gerrie Fourie took a leap of faith. After 13 years of climbing the ranks at Stellenbosch Farmers Winery, he joined a venture that would become Capitec at the invitation of its founder, Michiel le Roux. 

“We were bringing in our own furniture,” Fourie recalls with a chuckle. “Writing the business plan took eight months but it was a critical part of our success.” 

Capitec would go on to revolutionise the traditional South African banking model. Where the big four smothered clients in fees and fine print, Capitec offered simplicity, flat pricing and, eventually, dominance. 

Read more: After the Bell: Capitec’s Gerrie Fourie and the power of family in producing extraordinary people

Fourie might be stepping down as CEO after the company’s AGM on 18 July, but he’s not fading into the boardroom wallpaper just yet. If anything, he’s still in full sprint – data-crunching, AI-touting and philosophising about real interest rates with a kind of Buddhist calm.

The philosophy of Gerrie

Fourie isn’t your usual corporate exit interview. Even in his final year, he’s been mulling over the repo rate, inflation targets and the misread potential of South Africa’s informal sector, all with the unshakable calm of someone who’s survived worse – like that day in 2018 when Viceroy Research accused Capitec of reckless lending, calling the company “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”. 

“It was probably the darkest day, because it was an attack on [our] integrity and what you’re doing, that you’re dishonest,” Fourie says.

Read more: Viceroy vs Capitec: It’s Complicated

The report sent Capitec’s share price into a nosedive. But it bounced back. And so did Fourie. 

“You build a bank with so much integrity, honesty, and you really want to deliver value for your clients,” he says. “But it also helped us in the sense that it showed our character; it showed how serious we were about the business. All our stakeholders could see how we reacted immediately and how sincere we were.” 

Culture as currency 

Not only was Capitec’s banking model different from what was already out there, it hired and trained differently. 

“Our culture is all about the client, people and delivery,” he says and goes on to tell how Capitec brought in psychometric tests to ensure that people had the right skills and leadership traits to connect with the communities they were working in. 

Fourie embedded what became known internally as the “CEO principle” - an acronym for client, energy and ownership. 

Read more: Capitec ups its game — new board member signals bank’s big ambitions

“If you run a department or wherever you are, you need to act as a CEO. We’ve built quite a lot on culture and our people being CEOs.” 

This approach to company culture worked. While other banks clung to marble branches and multi-page contracts, Capitec built a brand with a dedicated client base and a user-friendly digital interface. 

“We said: one product, one pricing, all clients treated the same,” Fourie explains. Capitec became South Africa’s biggest retail bank by customers, with a growing footprint in insurance, mobile services and digital payments.

Cash is dying (but here’s another 800 ATMs) 

In true Capitec fashion, it’s both/and, not either/or — Capitec’s double-strategy of expanding physical reach while pushing digital, shows Fourie doesn’t believe in binaries. 

“This year, we’re adding another 800 ATMs,” Fourie says. “The ultimate goal is to move people to electronic payments. It’s much safer, much more secure and it also gives us much more data to better understand the client.”

Only 11% of Capitec’s transactions this year were cash, according to Fourie. AI, on the other hand, is integrated everywhere in the business. 

Read more: SMME Focus: How SA banks are rethinking SMME finance in a cash-first economy

Fourie tells a story about Capitec executives recently hitting the streets, sleeves rolled up, selling point-of-sale devices and merchant services door-to-door. “It’s an interesting exercise,” he says, reflective as ever. “They’re going into a particular area, [asking] where all the restaurants are, who are the owners [...] and then working through it and coming up with a sales plan.” 

This spiel would have normally taken someone two or three weeks and now it takes five or 10 minutes with AI, Fourie explains. 

The company’s fixation on data and expansion isn’t just for show. In 2017, after a marathon “stress session” on the West Coast, Capitec decided to strip the word “bank” from its brand. “We said we need to move away from just being a bank [and become] a financial institution,” Fourie says. That meant value-added services, connectivity, and insurance. 

“Our people have moved from maintaining the bank or running the bank to developing new products.”

Growth, grit and the informal sector 

Even during his last hurrah, Fourie is picking battles and challenging sacred cows. Like the official unemployment rate. 

He stirred the pot recently by claiming that the real unemployment figure is closer to 10%, not the 32.9% stated by StatSA, because the informal economy is vastly undercounted. 

He stands by it. “If we don’t understand the informal sector, there’s at least a third of the economy in South Africa we don’t understand.”

Read more: Unemployment, poverty and inequality

He’s equally blunt when asked about the Reserve Bank’s push to lower the inflation target to 3%. “I don’t know how you do that in a country where the currency is so volatile,” he says. “I just fear it might result in interest rates staying higher than they should be.”

Fourie says one should rather be looking at real rates. “A much better way to look at it is your gap between inflation and your repo rate. Because that, for me, is a big determining factor. […] Is that gap big or small? How do you grow the economy? Should that gap not be smaller?”

A not-quite goodbye 

Fourie is not done thinking about South Africa. But he is done setting the daily pace. “As a CEO, you’re under pressure, you need to set the pace. If you want to set the pace, it has to be 130%. You can’t set it at 80%.”

He could have stayed until 65. He turns 62 this year and he’s leaving on his own terms. 

Fourie will stay at Capitec for a year to coach his successor, Graham Lee, and help map Capitec’s international ambitions. He also says that he will be splitting his time between homes in Hermanus and Stellenbosch, even though Stellenbosch will probably take precedence, as all his grandkids are there. 

There’s also Gondwana Game Reserve, a luxury safari destination close to Mossel Bay, of which he’s a part-owner, and a few smaller ventures percolating under the radar. 

“The one thing that’s definitely certain is that things are going to change,” he says. “Tech allows you to be extremely agile. But it all starts with understanding your client.”

He has helped build a bank on that belief. And it becomes clear that Fourie isn’t done. He’s just getting started — again. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.