The Co-Founder of South African Bank Capitec Borrows $402 Million Against His Shares

SOUTH AFRICA · WEALTH

Michiel le Roux, the co-founder of South African lender Capitec, has raised about $402 million by borrowing against 1.37 million of his own shares. He unlocked the cash without selling a single one, a regulatory filing shows.

Why Michiel le Roux borrows instead of selling

The deal runs through Kalander Sekuriteit, one of le Roux’s investment vehicles, and covers 1,374,356 Capitec shares. A filing published on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange on Tuesday, July 7, sets it out.

Kalander cash-settled a hedging arrangement first struck in May 2023. It then replaced that deal with a new refinancing over the same block of stock.

Nothing was sold. The shares are pledged as collateral, so the founder keeps his ownership, his votes and any upside the stock delivers, while getting cash today.

For an international reader, this is the classic founder’s move. A fortune tied up in a single stock is turned into ready cash without triggering a sale.

Elon Musk did the same in 2022. He borrowed more than $12.5 billion against his Tesla shares to help fund his purchase of Twitter.

A structure with a built-in floor

Capitec set out the mechanics in the filing. A hedging counterparty lends money to Kalander for the life of the deal, and the total debt, interest included, can never exceed the hedged shares times the put strike price.

That cap means the pledged stock always covers the debt, shielding le Roux if the share price collapses. It also limits what he collects if Capitec keeps climbing.

Le Roux sits on Capitec’s board as a non-executive director. So the deal had to be disclosed under JSE rules on dealings by associates of directors, and Capitec did not say what he plans to do with the money.

A trade he has run since 2018

Le Roux first hedged 1.25 million Capitec shares in December 2018 through another vehicle, Limietberg Sekuriteit. The bank put that step down to market volatility at the time, when almost everything he owned was tied up in Capitec stock.

The deals have grown with the share price. A June 2025 refinancing covered 672,220 shares worth about 2.39 billion rand, and another in October 2025 rolled 507,500 hedged shares into a new arrangement.

Tuesday’s transaction dwarfs both. Forbes puts le Roux’s fortune at about $3.8 billion, or 62 billion rand.

The bank built for the overlooked

Le Roux set up Capitec in the university town of Stellenbosch in 2001, alongside Jannie Mouton and Riaan Stassen. The goal was to serve customers South Africa’s big banks largely ignored.

He ran it as its first chief executive until 2004 and chaired the board from 2007 to 2016.

The one-time micro-lender now counts 26 million active clients, with digital adoption close to 90 percent. Headline earnings for the year to February 28 rose 23 percent to about $1.03 billion, with return on equity of 31 percent.

Growth has come with strain. Loan disbursements jumped 34 percent to about $6 billion, while the credit-loss ratio, which measures bad loans against the book, rose to 8.1 percent from 7.5 percent.

South Africa’s most valuable bank

Capitec’s stock has climbed roughly 191 percent in five years. In January it became the fastest South African company to reach a 500 billion rand valuation.

Its market value of about 566 billion rand now edges FirstRand at 547 billion and Standard Bank at 530 billion, according to Billionaires.Africa. The three have traded places repeatedly this year.

That climb has made Capitec’s founders extraordinarily wealthy, and they have handled it differently. Mouton’s family foundation last year bought the private school operator Curro for about $441 million and turned it into a not-for-profit, the largest philanthropic deal South Africa has seen.

Le Roux has taken the other road: hold everything, and borrow against it. Whether the trade looks shrewd will depend, as it has since 2018, on where the stock goes next.

What it signals for African markets

Share-backed lending has long been a Wall Street staple. Its arrival at this scale shows the Johannesburg exchange working like its global peers, with bankers now building the same founder-liquidity trades they build in New York.

The disclosure also reads as a signal of confidence. A founder who expected his bank to stall would more likely sell than borrow against it, and le Roux has never meaningfully reduced his stake.

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