South Africa’s banks are placing strikingly different bets on artificial intelligence. Investec is resisting the AI-first turn that competitors such as Discovery and Capitec are embracing – and the divergence maps closely onto each bank’s client base and how it competes.
Investec CIO Graeme Lockley told TechCentral the specialist private bank has no intention of putting AI at the centre of its strategy. “We say human first. We are a human-first organisation.”
TechCentral spoke to Lockley at Investec’s Sandton headquarters on Friday, where the bank was hosting a careers-in-tech event for grade 9-12 learners called Developing Tech Talent – an occasion that doubled as a statement of the bank’s argument that people, not technology, define the institution.
Lockley said Investec’s competitive position rests on client relationships rather than scale, and that AI cannot replicate what those relationships demand. “We don’t have the size and scale of FNB and Standard Bank and all of those. And so the way we differentiate is how we interact with our clients.”
Technology at Investec is cast as a support function – something to absorb repetitive work so staff can concentrate on higher-value interaction. “Technology will help us do all the boring stuff, the mechanical stuff, so that our people can focus on what people are really good at. That is human connections, relationships, understanding. AI or technology can’t do that.”
Lockley is sceptical of treating AI as a decision-maker. “If you think of AI as the super smart savant, you are going to make some terrible choices. But if you see it as a tool that helps you in a decision-making process, then it is very, very useful.”
‘Critical faculties’
He cautioned against blind confidence in AI outputs, likening the technology to the early days of search. “There’s a certain naivety of people in using AI. It’s a little bit like, in the early days, did you trust Google? And the answer is ‘no, not really,’ it was just helpful and useful. I think we mustn’t give up on critical faculties.”
Direct rival Discovery Bank has taken the opposite approach and is spending to back it. The group placed AI at the centre of its growth strategy earlier this year, launching what it calls Vitality AI. The division recorded an operating loss of R155-million for the six months to end-December 2025, more than double the prior period – a figure that reflects the scale of the investment.
Read: Capitec bets big on AI – and keeps hiring
Discovery draws behavioural and health data from more than 40 million Vitality members across more than 40 markets, and argues that data position gives it a real edge in deploying AI.
Capitec has placed AI tools in the hands of almost 5 000 employees and is running an agentic AI system inside its business banking credit processing operation. Chairman Santie Botha and CEO Graham Lee told shareholders in a joint letter in April: “AI is not a future aspiration. It is already at work.”
The bank’s 2026 integrated annual report sets out what that has meant in practice: AI-driven models blocked more than 131 000 fraudulent beneficiaries, prevented more than 394 000 scam payments and averted about R673-million in potential client losses over the year.
“Our strategy is not to reduce headcount,” said Lee on Capitec’s investments in AI technology. “The reason for that is we have so much growth in our business, so much work still to do and so many clients to serve. The meaningful difference will be limiting growth in headcount from here and being able to serve more clients with more things with the people we have.”
For all the contrast in strategy, none of the big banks is presenting AI as a route to a smaller workforce.
Read: Absa’s defence against frontier AI cyberthreats: more AI
Even the country’s purely digital challengers pitch AI as a way of improving their service offerings rather than simply driving automation. GoTyme CEO Cheslyn Jacobs said customer behaviour has shifted in ways that favour digital banks. Clients are no longer loyal to a single institution; they pick products to suit specific needs and are increasingly multi-banked. GoTyme is positioning itself to capture that shift at scale. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
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