Author: Hilton Tarrant

Discovery Bank will start accepting new clients from Monday, three months later than it had anticipated when it unveiled its banking proposition in November.

The country’s big four traditional banks – Absa, FNB, Nedbank and Standard Bank – have together shut 695 branches since their respective peaks in the earlier part of this decade.

Standard Bank has announced the full list of branches that have been or will be closed, as part of the realignment of “its retail and business banking delivery model”.

Why the e-commerce business is rolling out physical collection points.

The decision by Standard Bank to close 91 branches and cut 1 200 jobs is not at all surprising – the only surprises were that the bank announced it publicly and that it did so before elections in May.

Data published by the department of public enterprises and Eskom shows just how important the contribution from solar and wind is becoming.

Public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan has sketched two scenarios for winter that stretched the bounds of our collective credulity.

In times of crisis – especially with questionable crisis communication from government and Eskom over the past week – humans tend to create their own “reality”, whether grounded in fact or not.

Even at a generous 20GW, the electricity available from Eskom’s coal fleet is barely 52% of the about 38.6GW nominal capacity. These numbers are horrifying.

Ahead of its unbundling from parent Naspers and separate listing on the JSE, the bear case for MultiChoice is fairly well understood by the market. The reality, as always, is a lot more nuanced.