I am an avid fan of Capitec. I'm not ashamed to admit it, I mean the bank pays me to bank with them! My fees are about R30 a month AND I get at least R50 each month in interest, that excludes the interest I get from my fixed deposits (which are also much better than any other bank).I remember when I was looking at trying to save money and I went to ABSA (my bank at the time) and asked them about fixed deposits and other savings products. They actually told me I had to pay them to put my money away! A fee to lock my money away so that they could use it to make money for themselves! Countries like the UK and China have free bank accounts, why are we so behind? If you pay a monthly fee you get amazing benefits like what FNB is offering, cash back, travel insurance, all of that. The only positive thing I can think of regarding fee based banking is that it did protect our banks somewhat during the 2008 economic crises.
Anyway, so, back to the point! The Capitec Banking App is here. I quite like the app. It looks nice and polished compared to other apps I have seen and it is much better than the Capitec Online Banking Website. The only problem is that it does sometimes get stuck loading and can take a while if your internet connection is unreliable.
When I first registered the app I ran into quite a few troubles as it did not ask me to send an sms to confirm my cell number. This could be because I was too keen and opened the app before the assistant had completed registering me or maybe it was because of my dodgy wifi mifi device I was using (out of 3G data on my phone already)
The other thing I don't like about the app is that it now replaces my pin dongle (the little device you pay R150 for when activating internet banking). I now have to use my cellphone to access my online banking. The worst part of this, and I have seen it happen to a mybroadband forum participant, is that if I change my cellphone I have to go to the branch again and re-register my new phone. I remember when my phone broke I changed phones twice in 2 weeks, I first went back to my old phone, but it was far too slow so I started to use my wife's old phone. It would have been such a pain to have to go to the branch so many times.
You can do quite a few things on the app such as making payments, transferring money between your accounts, creating new beneficiaries, etc. as you can see a few on the left. This is all protected by an initial pin that you are requested to enter when you open the app. Not exactly the most secure form should your phone get stolen. It seems the time out for asking for your pin is not very regular, it only asks for the pin when you click on one of the options, like Payments for example, but after a few minutes I am still able to make payments on it. I have yet to actually make a payment on it. I hope that it will ask for the pin again when I actually pay a new beneficiary.
So, in conclusion I am really glad to finally have a banking app from Capitec. I took them far too long to get it to market, but then I am certainly not their main customer. Now that it is here it certainly has improved the banks offering. Now they just need to offer a free credit card and FX exchange.
PS: Apologies for the iPhone review. The old wife's phone I am using now is an iPhone. I look forward to adding a Android review!
Update (24/06/2014) : I rather unpleasantly discovered that when installing the app and keying in a pin for it I also changed my online banking website password. No-one informed me about this, I had to suspend my account twice before the second person at the call centre explained that I had to use my new Pin as a password on the website.
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Written by Mark Robson
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