TymeBank Raising $150 Million as It Prepares for IPO

The CEO of South Africa’s TymeBank says the company is raising $150 million.

“We are currently valued at close to $1 billion and busy with our series D capital raise at unicorn valuation,” Coenraad Jonker told Bloomberg News on Wednesday (June 12), noting that the company is preparing for an initial public offering (IPO).

“Our target is to list TymeBank in New York by 2028, and we will most likely also do a secondary listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange for our South African shareholders,” Jonker added.

The digital bank hopes to conclude the funding round by the fourth quarter, he said, using the funds to pay for expansion to places like Indonesia by the year’s end.

Jonker’s comments to Bloomberg follow an interview last week with the Financial Times, in which the executive said Tyme aims to be the fastest growing bank in South Africa.

“We want [to] be in the top three in customer numbers and from a return on equity perspective,” he said. “Initial engagement with investors [has] encouraged us to consider raising a larger round to enable the group to accelerate the pursuit of further attractive opportunities that we currently see in the industry.”

TymeBank began by offering customers a debit card with no fees and a transactional bank account in a country where roughly 20% of the population is either unbanked or underbanked.

The company’s $150 million funding target is nearly double the amount the company raised last year to fund its expansion in South Africa and the Philippines.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote recently about the rise of America’s “banking deserts,” places where people do not have a conveniently located bank and broadband is often hard to come by, thus making both digital and brick-and-mortar banking difficult.

Still, with efforts underway to expand broadband access throughout the U.S., the raw material is in place to expand the use of mobile channels even where physical branches may be rare.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The 2024 Credit Union Innovation Readiness Index” shows that digital banking and mobile banking are growing in popularity with consumers, especially at credit unions. Ninety percent of top-performing credit unions reported an uptick in member satisfaction with their mobile app in the last year, while 83% saw the number of mobile app downloads increase.

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