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Back in 2019, GoTyme (or TymeBank as it was known then) was a single South African digital bank trying to prove that a self-service kiosk could open accounts faster than a branch.
Fast forward to today, and it has now expanded to serve 20+ million customers across South Africa and the Philippines. The digital bank has also earned the kind of validation most digital banks still chase after.
In a recent interview with Fintech News Network’s Chief Editor Vincent Fong, Tyme Group Chief Growth Officer Rachel Freeman and Head of Group Strategy Anxin Leong talked about the journey so far: how the bank got here, what the Philippines taught the company, and what’s coming next; a third bank within the year and an IPO when the time is right.
How Self-Service Kiosks Gave GoTyme a Cheaper Route to Scale
Tyme Group’s South African bank launched in 2019 with a hybrid model that could raise eyebrows even today.
It was a fully digital product paired with self-service physical kiosks found at retail partners. A potential customer could open a GoTyme Bank account within five minutes with a single valid ID, and walk away with a free Visa debit card immediately.
As the kiosks sat inside retail stores that customers already walked through, a sign-up cost a fraction of what a pure digital-marketing campaign would have demanded.
Rachel Freeman
“Our customer acquisition cost, because of the kiosks in the grocery stores, made us much more efficient than the digital marketing model,” Rachel shared. “It’s about being very efficient, being very lean, and recognising that the kiosk model drives efficiency.”
With the kiosks, the bank bypassed customer acquisition costs that typically sunk many app-only digital banks.
Beyond the kiosks, Tyme ran on Mambu’s cloud-native banking platform, which offered scalability and speed-to-market. According to a Mambu case study,
“The implementation took six months, and during that time, the bank migrated 85% of its infrastructure to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, a shift that allowed Tyme to halve its operational costs.”
The rest came down to discipline.
Tyme held its cost base flat while customer numbers climbed and invested early in infrastructure built to scale. Profitability also reached across the whole customer base, ranging from middle-income savers to recipients of government grants.
Tyme Cross-Pollinates Best Practices Between Two Continents
If the kiosk economics explain how Tyme Group won at home, the Philippines was where it learned how to travel.
When the group exported the model to its second market, the working assumption was that a great deal of reworking was necessary to cater to local conditions. Interestingly enough, what the group found was quite the opposite.
Sure, some things needed to change. The look and feel of the app, for example, or the language applied, were localised to suit the market. The products within, though, were more portable than Tyme anticipated.
The clearest lesson came from brand positioning. In the Philippines, leaning into aspirational messaging helped the bank scale faster, and that insight is now being carried to South Africa.
A deeper discovery involved the customers themselves.
“Underneath everything, people are people, and how they think about money is very similar,” Rachel said. “South Africa and the Philippines are vastly different countries, but the data showed people’s usage of the account was much more similar than we expected.”
These insights realigned how the group approached its digital banking ideation. Tyme runs what Rachel calls cross-pollination; the app itself was brought from the Philippines back to South Africa, while the rebrand of the South African business is being led by an executive who previously ran marketing in the Philippines.
Rachel explained,
“We’re thinking about how to expand our merchant cash advance product to new markets, and how best to do that. Whether it’s in Malaysia or maybe we might even have a flag in Singapore. We continue to be interested in Pakistan, too.”
Lessons travel in both directions, fuelling the muscle the company needs before it opens its third front.
Tyme Is Scouting For Its Third Market and Getting IPO-Ready
After proving its model across South Africa and the Philippines, the question Tyme Group is now sitting with is where the third GoTyme Bank should land. Rachel is candid that the decision is live, with several markets in the frame and a deliberate process underway to narrow them down.
The group behind GoTyme Bank is eyeing Pakistan for its third digital bank launch. Tyme Group already serves 22 million customers across the Philippines and South Africa. Chief Growth Officer Rachel Freeman shared with us that bank number three is six to twelve months away from being decided. @gotymebank @gotymebankza fintech digitalbanking gotyme philippines neobank
She expects the call to come into sharper focus over the next six to 12 months. “We’re working on it right now,” she said.
The Tyme Group IPO ambition is firming up alongside it, though the timeline remains fluid. Anxin’s framing is that listing is a question of when, not if, and that the work to make the group listing-ready has already started.
@gotymebankza is eyeing a US$15 billion IPO valuation. Head of Group Strategy Anxin Leong shared with Fintech News Network their IPO timeline. Fintech IPO Banking
For all the talk of third markets and listing windows, the group’s immediate task is getting millions of loyal customers to call the bank by its new name: GoTyme.
That single brand consistency will enable Tyme to travel and stay memorable across borders. The listing, as Anxin says, is a matter of time.
But for the company, it’s always GoTyme.
If this piece left you wanting more on how Mambu helped underpin Tyme Group‘s cross-continent scaling, watch the full conversation below.
