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.

What actually differs

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

Distribution: Capitec sells prepaid over the counter in its branches, with Rica done on the spot, tops up by USSD and cash voucher, and has sold smartphones since October 2025 with zero-deposit finance. The architecture assumes a customer who may have neither a card nor a data connection at the moment of purchase. FNB Connect is sold through the FNB app and online banking, and assumes a customer already logged in.
Product weighting: Capitec is prepaid. FNB’s base sits predominantly in top-up and post-paid.
Reward shape: Capitec runs one lever: link your Connect number to your main account and every recharge carries 20% more data, the same 20% for everyone who links, with a further 1GB/month for credit card holders. FNB runs a ladder — earn-back on Sim plans and devices that rises with eBucks level and qualifying card spend, from nothing at the bottom rungs to as much as 100% back on a device at the top.
Pond size: Capitec has 26 million clients. FNB’s retail base is just under nine million, roughly a third of that.

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.

Why one is bigger

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 disclosure gap is worth noting for what it is:

Capitec reports Capitec Connect as a product line with its own net income: R442-million against R193-million, data traffic tripling to 40.5 petabytes, voice minutes more than doubling to 768 million.
FirstRand reports FNB Connect revenue up 14% to more than R3-billion, transaction volumes of R26-billion against R22-billion and average revenue per user up 8% — but that spans digital services, devices and the MVNO together.

The two cannot be set against each other.

Converging further

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. Capitec has been doing it for a year — its airtime advances tripled to R97.3-million in the year to February.

FNB’s device business is growing at more than 18% a year, sold on three- to 36-month terms and part-payable in eBucks, with refurbished handsets doing well alongside aspirational ones. Capitec started selling devices in October 2025 with zero-deposit finance and free monthly data attached. About 30% of FNB’s digital sales now happen on eSim; Capitec has said it will roll eSim out this year.

Capitec has said it is eyeing home broadband. Asked whether FNB would follow, Sookroo twice declined to answer, saying only that it is a significant market opportunity and that FNB would make announcements closer to the time. He gave the same non-answer on fixed-wireless access, which MVNOs have been eyeing as consumer mobile saturates.

They cannot take each other’s customers

Perhaps the biggest consequence of the closed model is that these two are not really rivals at all. You would have to bank with both to choose between their Sims. Neither can win a subscriber from the other without first winning a banking client, which is a far harder and more expensive thing to do.

What they are competing with is the incumbent networks, and each other’s example. When Capitec cut data prices or made on-net calls free, the pressure hit Vodacom, MTN and Telkom rather than on FNB.

Dalene Steyn Capitec Connect — Capitec Connect head Dalene Steyn

Which leaves a different open question to the one usually asked. Not whose strategy wins, but what happens when a closed banking MVNO has signed up everyone in its base who wants a second Sim.

FNB’s model is insulated from the saturation problem because it does not need connectivity revenue to justify itself. Capitec’s has the same ceiling over a bigger base, on thinner margins, with a deepening dependence on a host network it does not control.