Capitec Connect cooking

Capitec’s mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) recorded explosive revenue and subscriber growth in the past year.

According to the bank’s latest annual results, Capitec Connect’s net income increased by 451% — from R35 million to R193 million — between 2024 and 2025.

The improvement was driven by a 74% increase in subscribers with active SIM cards within the last six months to 1.6 million.

Despite only launching in 2022, Capitec Connect is South Africa’s biggest MVNO. It quickly overtook older bank-based MVNOs like FNB Connect and Standard Bank Connect, with data affordability its key differentiator.

To attract users to the service, the bank offers benefits like 1GB of free data per month for credit card holders with verified Capitec Connect numbers.

Capitec explained that some of its major changes in the year included expanding beyond offering a simple pay-as-you-use service that it marketed as “non-expiring data”.

It introduced daily (1-day), weekly (7-day), and monthly (30-day) bundles, which Capitec reported now account for over 60% of sales on the network.

Data usage on Capitec Connect surpassed 13.4 petabytes (13.4 million gigabytes), and voice usage exceeded 306.9 million minutes.

Capitec Connect also launched streaming, WhatsApp, and larger LTE bundles and started providing airtime advances from July 2024.

Offering airtime on credit is a big money spinner for mobile network operators like Vodacom.

The bank said it will be adding more benefits in the 2026 financial year to reward Capitec Connect customers for good banking behaviour.

Capitec said its strategic focus areas for the MVNO were as follows:

• Implement a simple and affordable data and airtime product offering
• Enable clients who use cash to stay connected
• Enable clients to get airtime advances to stay connected
• Make quality handsets available to clients through competitive pricing and device financing
• Use data as an incentive to drive and reward behaviour

The table below provides a summary of Capitec Connect’s subscribers and net income in its 2024 and 2025 financial years.