Capitec and FNB are running the same MVNO playbook

Capitec Connect and FNB Connect are sometimes set against each other as competing theories of what a bank should do with a mobile network. But the closer you look at the two businesses, the more alike they look.

Both run on Cell C. Both sell only to their own banking clients. Both tier their rewards by the banking relationship. Both sell handsets on finance. Both now lend customers airtime. Both measure success in active users rather than Sims issued. And both exist for the same reason: to make the banking base stickier, not to earn oodles of money from connectivity.

FNB Connect CEO Sashin Sookroo was candid about that in an interview with TechCentral on Thursday. The business is not chasing the cheap end of the market, he said. It counts only customers who are either paying for a service or generating network traffic — what the industry calls “true active”, measured over three months — rather than Sims issued. On that basis, the FNB-owned mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) has just over a million subscribers.

South Africans hold multiple Sims, he said: one for home, one for data, one bought for a family member. FNB’s goal is to be the Sim that gets used rather than one of several in a drawer. He described the multiplier the bank is after: bank with FNB, take connectivity from FNB, earn rewards, spend the rewards on more data or a phone.

That is a coherent position. It is also, almost word for word, the argument Capitec has been making since 2022. Capitec Connect head Dalene Steyn told TechCentral in 2024 that the main goal of the business was not revenue or income but having clients actively use the service, and that driving up active users was the metric that sat above all others for her.

Four things separate them, and all four follow from who banks with each:

Those are real differences. They are not competing strategies so much as the same strategy executed against different customers. A bank serving 26 million people, many of them prepaid and cash-based, sells Sims over a counter and prices flat. A bank serving nine million, skewed wealthier and app-native, sells inside the app and rewards by tier.

Asked why Capitec has more customers despite arriving years later, Sookroo put it down to timing and the cost of moving first. FNB paid “school fees” as the early innovator, he said, and network quality at the time was not what it should have been. Those problems are behind the business, and the focus is growth and scale.

The pond explains most of the rest. Capitec reported 1.5 million three-month active clients for the year to 28 February 2026, against FNB’s just over a million on the same measure — about half as big again, off a base three times the size. On penetration, FNB is doing rather better than the headline numbers suggest.

The product road maps are moving towards each other, not apart. FNB launched an airtime advance product with Optasia last week, lending customers airtime at the point of need; Sookroo declined to say who carries the credit risk.