South African lender Capitec Bank reported a 20 percent rise in half-year profit on Wednesday, helped by strong client growth.
Headline earnings per share (EPS) came in at 2,128 cents in six months ended August, compared with 1,769 cents a year earlier.
Headline EPS, the widely watched profit measure in South Africa, strips out certain one-off items.
Capitec attracted 109,000 additional active clients every month in the past six months, it said, bringing the total number to 10.5 million customers.
Launched in 2001 as a micro-lending business, Capitec is positioning itself as a fully fledged bank with no-frills account, savings and insurance and credit card products to cut its reliance on unsecured loans, which rely solely on a customer's promise to pay it back.
The lender is also among bidders for Mercantile Bank - a unit of the Portuguese state-owned banking group CGD - a transaction that will help the Stellenbosch-based company branch out into business banking.
Capitec, which competes with Nedbank, Standard Bank, FirstRand and Absa Group, said net income from transaction fees surged 32 percent to 3.1 billion rand ($216.18 million), while net income from lending slipped 4 percent to 6.1 billion rand.
The lender, which earlier this year was accused by short-seller Viceroy Research to have overstated its assets and income, will give shareholders an interim dividend of 630 cents per share, up 20 percent.
- Reuters
