South Africa’s mid-corporate sector: An overlooked engine of growth with a banking model now built to support it

Look past the headlines about big corporates and struggling small businesses, and you find a sector that carries far more of the country’s economic load than most people realise: the mid-corporates.

These businesses – typically privately or family-owned with annual turnovers beginning at around R750 million and often stretching into the billions – form a critical layer of the country’s industrial and employment base. Many have progressed from first-generation family operations to sophisticated third or fourth-generation enterprises with mature balance sheets, diversified ownership, and ambitious growth trajectories.

Yet the support they receive from the financial sector has never truly matched their economic weight.

Mid-corporates sit in a unique position. They are too large and complex to be treated like scaled-up small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and are not aligned with the priorities or processes of corporate and investment banking. Their needs are distinct, operating with entrepreneurial agility while managing institutional-level complexity. They grow quickly, remain closely connected to their communities, and drive meaningful job creation and regional development.

Despite this, most mid-corporates have long been placed into conventional banking models that do not recognise their nuanced needs. As Herman de Kock, Managing Executive for Mid-Corporate at Nedbank, explains, they do not fit neatly into either business banking or corporate investment banking. The result has been service gaps across the industry.

Those gaps have had real consequences: many mid-corporates have been slowed by lengthy credit processes, fragmented engagement, and decision-making structures that cannot match the pace of a scaling industrial business.

As their growth needs intensified – including expansion financing, equipment investment, regional diversification, and acquisitions – fintech lenders and private credit funds moved into the space with faster and more flexible solutions. Their success underscored both the strategic value of mid-corporates and the lack of a banking model built explicitly for them.

Nedbank’s response was to design a banking model from the ground up. We established a dedicated mid-corporate division that integrates advisory capabilities, specialised credit structures, and deep sector expertise into a single value delivery system.

At the centre of this model is a dedicated mid-corporate credit committee. This marks a fundamental shift from legacy structures, where mid-sized corporate applications were evaluated alongside submissions from SMEs and large corporations. Each relationship manager is paired with a senior credit manager and analyst who focus exclusively on mid-corporate portfolios. This provides continuity, institutional memory, and significantly faster turnaround times.

According to De Kock, Nedbank has completed complex acquisition funding for new clients within intellectual property and turnaround times that trump industry standards. For existing clients, approvals can be completed within days, depending on the nature of the request.

But the model is not only about speed. Mid-corporates often require blended funding strategies that combine senior debt, mezzanine finance, private equity, or private credit. They also need guidance on balance sheet optimisation, working capital management, capital expenditure programmes, and transaction-led growth. As they expand regionally, Nedbank supports them with exchange control requirements, regulatory considerations, and multijurisdictional planning.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) expectations have become another pressure point. To support this, Nedbank partners with specialist organisations to help mid-corporates respond to sustainability-related requirements and stakeholder expectations.

Sector expertise forms another core pillar. The division encompasses deep capabilities across agriculture ( including both primary and secondary sectors), manufacturing, retail (including franchising), logistics, and professional services. This allows Nedbank to engage based on operational and regulatory realities rather than relying on generic banking templates, and enables more accurate risk assessment and better-aligned funding structures.

This approach is emerging at a critical moment, as mid-corporates enter a new growth phase while navigating rising input costs, infrastructure and logistics constraints, evolving regulations, ESG requirements, and intensifying competition in global and regional markets.

Their ability to expand, modernise, and scale responsibly depends on access to well-structured capital and informed, responsive advisory support, all delivered through an industry-leading leverage finance team with world-class knowledge and experience. Nedbank aims to provide that partnership, recognising that senior debt alone is often not enough to unlock the full potential of their growth strategies.

De Kock’s background reinforces this design. With 23 years of experience at Nedbank across business and commercial banking, supported by early-career research work in the African banking and information and communication technology sector, he brings deep insight into the operating realities of these clients and the broader economic implications for the mid-corporate segment.

Mid-corporates remain among the most resilient and strategically important contributors to national employment, industrial capacity, and long-term competitiveness. Nedbank’s decision to build a model specifically for this segment signals both recognition of that role and commitment to supporting it.

The path forward for the economy will depend, in part, on whether these firms can invest, scale, and compete with confidence. A banking model that understands their complexity and supports their ambitions is not optional. It is fundamental to sustained competitiveness. DM