Building Conviction is Peregrine Capital's podcast on the leaders behind some of South Africa's most compelling businesses. “Our job is to identify businesses led by people with genuine long-term conviction and develop a deep understanding of those businesses, so that we are ready to invest when the right opportunity presents itself,” says Conradie. “Building Conviction is our way of pulling back the curtain on that process, through conversations with the leaders who’ve built and lead these businesses. Episode 3 does exactly that.”

Gerrie Fourie was part of the founding team when Capitec launched in 2001, ran operations for the bank’s first decade, and took over as CEO in 2014. By the time he retired in July 2025, Capitec served more than 24 million South Africans and had become the country’s largest bank by market capitalisation — one of the greatest compounding stories on the JSE. Fourie had built a career at Stellenbosch Farmers Winery, running whole provinces by his early thirties, when Michiel le Roux called to ask if he wanted to help build a bank. The timing could not have been harder: his wife had just been diagnosed with Lupus and had lost kidney function entirely. “I had to choose between secured, everything is fine, to completely high risk,” he says. “She said to me, go and live your passion. I will support you, doesn’t matter what.” He credits her, to this day, with the decision that let him build Capitec.

The founding team knew little about banking, and Fourie says that was the point. “We’re retailers, we think client and then risk,” he says. “Bankers look at risk, risk, risk, and then client.” From the start, the ambition was to bank 95% of South Africans — a vision the market consistently misread as either a microlender or a bank for low-income clients only. Capitec fought for share with what Fourie calls guerrilla warfare: rather than start in the cities, the team opened 20 branches in the Transkei — more than four times the handful run by the only local incumbent — working from the outside in before pushing into urban areas.

That client-first instinct shaped the brand for the next two decades. Capitec issued every client the same gold card, regardless of income —on the belief that “why do you have to classify clients? All clients are the same, they need to be treated the same.” Fourie is still visibly irritated by hidden fees and asterisked pricing elsewhere in the industry: Capitec built its fee structure around just a handful of flat, transparent charges, and extended branch hours to 7am to 10pm because, as he puts it, “you do what your client wants.” It took roughly twelve years before the market truly understood what Capitec was.

As the bank scaled, Fourie became preoccupied with keeping Capitec’s small-business instincts intact. The answer became the CEO principle — Client, Energy, Ownership — the idea that every employee, not just the person with the title, should run their patch like an owner. Sitting in interviews and hearing five or six different definitions of “culture” from his own people, Fourie called the executive team together and, in thirty minutes, wrote down what Capitec’s culture actually was: Client, People, Delivery. “All leaders will be replaced,” he says, “but culture won’t be replaced. If you manage culture, then the company should survive.”

The hardest test of that culture came in 2018, when short-seller Viceroy Research accused Capitec of concealing bad debts, wiping around 30% off the share price in a single trading day. “The hardest part wasn’t the process,” Fourie says. “It’s the fact that you’ve built a business and they’re actually attacking your integrity, what you stand for.” With no script to follow, he and finance director André du Plessis pulled the finance team back from a conference, assigned every allegation to someone to answer, and by late afternoon had briefed roughly 700 analysts and investors — more than double the number they’d expected. His lesson from the ordeal: work out who your stakeholders actually are — clients, staff, asset managers, media, the Reserve Bank — before deciding what to say to any of them.

Underpinning it all was a strict capital discipline. Capitec priced everything to a 25% return on equity — no higher, no lower — refusing pressure to hand back capital because, as Fourie says, that buffer is what carried the bank through Viceroy and later COVID. When returns ran above target, the response was to give the excess back to clients rather than bank it. The same discipline applied to product range: when Capitec acquired Mercantile Bank with 64 products, Fourie gave the team three weeks to cut it to ten. They landed on twelve. “Do one or two products exceptionally well, penetrate deeply, and focus on it,” he says. “People always want to do ten things. Do two or three well, finish it, then carry on to the next two or three.”

Fourie handed over to current CEO Graham Lee a year ago, and says the biggest lesson of life after the corner office is knowing when to stay quiet: “you can strategically challenge things, but on detail, stay away.” He remains bullish on what technology, and particularly AI, means for a data-rich business like Capitec — a valuation exercise that used to take him three or four days now takes about an hour, and credit committee reviews that once ran to forty pages and two weeks of analysis are now done in half an hour. Looking ahead, he points to the size of the opportunity still sitting inside Capitec’s own client base: with roughly 26 million clients and close to 900 branches, personal banking already commands about 40% market share, but business banking, insurance and value-added services each sit in the low single digits — with international expansion the long-term prize beyond that.

Fourie closes the episode with his Conviction Card: conviction, for him, isn’t about a particular sector or trade, but about execution itself. “If you believe in something, go and do it and execute on it,” he says. “Too many people talk and don’t deliver. It’s not ideas that count — it’s the people that go execute and do them.” Capitec, in his telling, is simply what happens when that idea is followed through for twenty-five years.

The full conversation is available now on Building Conviction, Peregrine Capital’s podcast series, on all leading podcast platforms, with new episodes every few weeks.

Watch full episode here

This podcast is produced by Peregrine Capital (Pty) Ltd, an authorised Financial Services Provider. Views expressed by speakers are their own at the time of recording, may change without notice, and don't necessarily reflect those of Peregrine Capital. Nothing in this podcast is an offer, solicitation or recommendation to buy or sell any security; Peregrine Capital and its associated funds may hold positions in companies discussed, which listeners should bear in mind. Statements on strategy, targets or expected performance are forward-looking, involve risk and uncertainty, and actual results may differ materially. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance. Listening does not create a client or advisory relationship with Peregrine Capital. This episode was recorded on 17 July 2026.