Sasfin gears up for larger slice of business banking
Former textile trading business knows fabric of entrepreneurship
● Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are not retail clients. Nor are they big corporations. But when banks approach SMEs they usually treat them as one of those.
“That’s why many SMEs struggle with their banking,” said Sasfin CEO Michael Sassoon.
Having worked with businesses for more than five decades and with a firm footing in financing trade, capital equipment, working capital and debtors, Sasfin is confident it knows what entrepreneurs want.
And that is the niche it aims to make its own while the big banks still use queues at branches as the first port of call for many growing businesses.
“We have a digital banking site that was developed with the SME in mind,” said Sassoon, who took over from his father Roland at the start of last year.
Established in 1951 as a textile trading operation, Sassoon Textiles was converted into a finance business in the 1960s. The family traces its roots back many centuries to a thriving merchant business in Baghdad in present-day Iraq.
More recently in SA, Sasfin obtained something that for years many others have coveted — a banking licence.
After the small-banks crisis in the early 2000s, hardly any new licences were granted by the Reserve Bank for more than a decade. The freeze only recently started thawing with newcomers TymeBank, Zero Bank and Discovery entering the fray.
Sasfin Bank is the largest profit-spinner for the group, generating more than half of its earnings last year and often more than twothirds. The other two pillars, as Sassoon calls them, are Sasfin Wealth and Sasfin Capital.
When internet banking platforms are designed, it is mostly not with small businesses in mind. That creates the opportunity to cater to specific needs. Sasfin’s B\\YOND platform has basic accounting, payroll and invoice capabilities built in, said Sassoon.
The bank will soon announce a partnership with a telecommunications company to take banking deeper into rural areas. Sasfin will provide the banking backbone, but it will not be under its own brand.
“We are the bank; they have the retail client base,” he said.
And the telco in question is not Vodacom, MTN, Telkom or Cell C, he added, but a smaller player.
Sasfin got more than its usual share of media attention in 2017 when it was one of the first JSE-listed companies to drop KPMG as auditors in the wake of graft allegations in the ongoing saga that has come to be known as “state capture”.
“In a way it was part of our normal audit rotation process and we would have done it the next year in any case,” Sassoon said. But it was a public relations coup and other banks that had the firm as auditor soon had to answer questions about their own plans for auditor rotation.
In Sasfin Capital, the company holds several private equity investments. “Sometimes we not only help with trading finance, but we take some equity and remain invested with a longer horizon.”
In 2000, Sasfin acquired Frankel Pollak Securities, which has since been the basis of Sasfin Wealth. “We would like to grow Wealth faster,” said Sassoon.
The business benefited from the trend of the well-to-do investing more of their assets abroad as SA’s political risk profile became more pronounced during Jacob Zuma’s tenure as president.
“For many years South Africans were happy to keep almost everything here, but more recently clients have wanted more choice … Why invest in the best 10 companies on the JSE if you can have exposure to the best companies in the world?”
We have a digital banking site that was developed with the SME in mind
Michael Sassoon
Sasfin CEO