TymeBank's Tjaart van der Walt on Building a Bank by Design

Where Tyme Group sits now: 18.2 million customers across three continents

Tyme Group today runs banking operations in three markets from a Singapore headquarters. The technology sits in a company called Time X in Vietnam, with roughly 600 software engineers, architects and designers. Across the group there are almost 2,000 staff and 18.2 million customers on the books: 11.4 to 11.6 million in South Africa through TymeBank, and 6.8 million in the Philippines through GoTyme Bank. Indonesia is the newest market, where the group has just launched its first product.

The group is adding between 400,000 and 500,000 customers a month, van der Walt said. Two weeks before the interview, Time magazine named the business among its 100 most influential companies of 2025, an accolade he framed less as vanity than as a lever for talent. "These accolades are actually very important for our talent density and development of our business," he said.

Why the bank was built on partnership, not branches

The strategy that made TymeBank cheap to run was fixed as a set of design parameters before a line of code was written. Van der Walt is emphatic that the outcome traces back to design rather than luck. He recalled a conference speaker asking an audience what the most important element of a house is. People answered "foundation". The speaker said no, it is the plan.

Tyme's plan set hard constraints. Distribution first, before building anything. A multi-country platform, because the founders believed they were building for tens or even hundreds of millions of people. The most ubiquitous cash-in and cash-out solution in the country, so the bank itself never had to move cash. No paper for staff or customers. No bricks and mortar beyond a small headquarters. Those parameters left only one route, van der Walt said: partnership. Tyme leaned on retailers such as Pick n Pay for physical reach, placing kiosks in stores rather than owning branches, and partnered early with MTN and Deloitte.

The payoff is a cost base van der Walt puts at 20 to 30 per cent of the cost to serve of the best incumbent bank, at least in Africa. That structure is what lets Tyme serve a SASSA grant holder receiving 370 rand a month profitably, something he said he is not aware of any other player doing outside one or two operators in China.

How the founders survived repeated near failures

The journey was not linear, and several times it looked like failure was inevitable. Van der Walt was candid that founders can hold shares but must also carry the financial risk, and he and Kun did so more than once. When Deloitte hit regulatory complexity in June 2012 and MTN got cold feet, the pair bought the offering out, and over a weekend convinced 15 people to leave the comfort of Deloitte and join them. Van der Walt put in about 60 per cent of what he had taken off the table from selling his earlier AI business to GE; Kun sold properties to fund his share.

There were two more capital moments of the same kind. In 2018 the founders bought the business back from Commonwealth Bank of Australia, with backing from Arc and Patrice Motsepe. Then in April 2020, a month after lockdowns began, a capital raise due to close in mid-April fell through the cracks, and the founders again put in a significant sum, roughly half of what they had banked from the earlier CBA sale.

What sustained it, in his words, was "belief, and sometimes it's just crazy belief". He credits a father's instruction that shaped his risk appetite: do not use a gun, use a guided missile. "You ready, fire, and then you aim. Get it into the air and work it out as you go." Crucially, he said, the senior team who had been there from the start shared that conviction even when some shareholders did not.

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What Tyme looks for before entering a new market

Tyme's expansion is governed by an explicit framework, not opportunism, van der Walt told the audience. Regulation comes first, with three tests: no wet-ink signatures required, a progressive regulator the business can help shape a framework with, and a regulator that permits cloud, specifically AWS in Tyme's case. He said the group walked away from a lucrative market because the government there would not allow an American cloud supplier to host a bank's platform.

Beyond regulation, Tyme looks for banking markets structured as oligopolies, where margins remain and non-interest revenue is achievable, and for the right distribution and capital partners. In the Philippines both came through a single family conglomerate. That partnership itself illustrated how the group operates: the deal was struck largely on trust and common friends in London, and van der Walt and Kun did not visit the country in person until October 2022, a month before the bank launched to the public.

Why culture and profit are the same conversation

For van der Walt, culture is the decisive ingredient, and it is inseparable from a hard line on profit. Asked what matters most in a startup, he named team, funding and leadership together, then singled out inspirational leadership and, above all, culture. He described an organisation that is deliberately unfriendly to mediocrity and politics, which he calls two sides of the same coin, and friendly to excellent people who want to move and shake.

He is equally blunt that purpose without profit does not last. "There's nothing that sustains other than a profitable organisation," he said, adding that he is personally critical of not-for-profit models as vehicles for lasting change. Executive teams over-analyse unit economics every month at a detailed level to keep the cost of acquisition low. The culture is flat and low-ego: executives rotate roles, no one is "married to the job title", and one office carries a sign telling people not to attend a meeting if they should not be in it.

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Why did the founders keep putting their own money in?

They kept funding TymeBank because they never doubted the venture, and because they treated financial risk as part of the founder's job rather than something to offload. Van der Walt said that across fourteen years he never once doubted the bet, which is why he was repeatedly prepared to put more money in. After the Deloitte spin-out, the CBA buy-back in 2018, and the collapsed 2020 raise, the founders each time reached for their own capital and that of family-and-friends investors. The deciding factor was conviction shared with a senior team who believed the thing would work.

Why does Tyme insist on AWS and low complexity?

Tyme requires AWS because keeping complexity and cost as low as possible is central to its whole model. Van der Walt said the group's rule is simple: if something cannot run within AWS, "we're not going anywhere". The formal decision sat with the group CIO and his team, but the logic ties straight back to the design parameters. A low cost to serve depends on a lean technology stack, and complexity is the enemy of that. It is also a market-entry filter: a regulator that will not permit AWS is, for Tyme, a reason to walk away.

How is Tyme preparing for AI and agentic banking?

Tyme is actively designing a next-generation bank around AI and agentic banking rather than defending its existing model. Van der Walt said the team is asking what they would do if they started the whole project again today, and that "agency banking" is core to that theme. Rather than shrink headcount, he expects the organisation to grow, arguing that the businesses that become genuinely data-obsessed and AI-literate are the ones that will work. The group is preparing every employee to be as AI-literate as possible while revisiting the original design parameters, and he believes Tyme's plug-and-play architecture leaves it well positioned to migrate as the market evolves.