TymeBank is set to launch an advance product for government grant recipients, which allows them to draw a portion of their child and old age grants 10 days before pay day.
CEO Coen Jonker says this will help cushion recipients from the depressed economy.
The product is part of a series of services TymeBank will offer in the near future, as the digital bank seeks to cement itself in the highly-competitive financial services sector by responding to customer needs.
“It’s like a salary advance, but for grant recipients to draw a portion of their grant 10 days before grant pay day,” Jonker tells ITWeb.
A merchant advance product, which provides working capital for the bank’s small business customers, is another new service lined up.
In an interview with ITWeb, Jonker says the key to success for banks in future “is essentially how fast can you develop new products, new functionalities and how fast can you respond to customer needs”.
In December alone, he says, TymeBank made more than 500 changes, including new products and new functionalities.
“In the last year, we launched a buy-now-pay-later product called MoreTyme; we launched a salary advance product called TymeAdvance, and we also launched a personal term loan product and a few insurance products. The most important one is TymeHealth, which is low-cost health insurance, and we also launched a range of upgrades to our transaction bank account.”
Jonker shared insights into TymeBank’s technology investments to grow the four-year-old bank, saying: “Technology investment is the biggest item on our income statement. In many banks, people (salaries) is the biggest item. For us, technology is the biggest expense item.
“We invest heavily in customer-facing user experiences. A lot of our technology investment is in continuously evolving customer experience.”
TymeBank has acquired 6.1 million customers since its launch in 2019 and now has an average 23 million transactions per month.
To grow its customer base, TymeBank recently announced an expanded partnership with The Foschini Group (TFG), launching co-branded TymeBank-TFG Money financial products and services.
The deal will see the unveiling of over 600 TymeBank-TFG Money-branded kiosks located in TFG stores across the country, offering banking services, targeting the retailer’s 26 million customers.
Some 180 000 customers have since been issued with a TymeBank TFG Money account debit card.
Putting AI to work
Detailing TymeBank’s future tech investments, Jonker says the bank is already ploughing in “hundreds of millions of rands” per year and the trend is set to continue, adding: “We have probably replaced half of our technology from the time we launched.”
He explains TymeBank uses the entirety of its technology spend annually, saying: “We think technology is so fast-moving, so unpredictable. We don’t know if technology we are using now will be useful for two years or five. We have such an extreme view on how fast our technology needs to change.”
Turning to how TymeBank is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to improve services, Jonker says the bank is “already using AI in a number of areas”.
This, as key trends outlined by Nvidia for financial services in 2023 show enterprises across industries are accelerating innovation and investment in AI and machine learning – and financial services is no exception.
Jonker says: “We use AI in the evaluation of our different customer segments; we used it for the development of customer journeys, trying to figure out what to offer our customers next. We also use it in credit assessment, particularly using alternative data, such as retail data.
“We will probably use it more in the behavioural aspect our business, when we look at evaluating and analysing the behaviour of customers, in order to figure out what customers would find useful and valuable from the bank. We also use AI in fraud and operational risk management.”
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