Old Mutual's banking ambitions are moving into a new phase.

Just 12 months after its public launch, OM Bank has surpassed one million customers, prompting South Africa's Old Mutual to reposition the digital bank from a complementary service into one of the group's main engines for future growth.

The milestone comes as Old Mutual attempts to carve out a larger share of South Africa's highly competitive retail banking market, where established players such as Capitec and the country's major banks already have deep customer relationships.

But Old Mutual is entering the contest with an asset many newer banks do not have: an established financial-services ecosystem spanning insurance, savings, investments, branches, advisers and millions of existing customers.

The strategy is to use that ecosystem to turn OM Bank into more than another account or lending product.

Old Mutual wants the bank to become the transactional centre of its relationship with customers.

One million customers in a year

OM Bank's customer acquisition has moved faster than Old Mutual initially expected.

The bank is currently adding approximately 4,500 customers a day, putting its growth rate in the same conversation as some of South Africa's fastest-growing retail banks.

The most significant part of the numbers, however, may be where those customers are coming from.

According to Old Mutual, approximately half of OM Bank's new customers are completely new to the wider Old Mutual group.

That means the bank is not simply moving existing insurance customers into another Old Mutual product.

It is also creating a new acquisition channel for the group.

There is still substantial room to cross-sell within Old Mutual's existing customer base.

The company has approximately 14 million customers in its mass-market segment and a network of about 7,245 tied financial advisers, giving OM Bank a distribution network that extends well beyond a conventional digital banking app.

Old Mutual is targeting the market below R50,000 a month

OM Bank's strategy is particularly focused on South Africans earning between R5,000 and R80,000 per month, with greater emphasis on consumers earning below R50,000.

This is a significant retail banking market.

It is also a segment where Capitec has established a particularly strong presence.

Old Mutual already has relationships with many customers in this income bracket through its mass and foundation businesses, which offer products including life and funeral insurance.

The bank therefore gives the group another financial product that can sit alongside those existing relationships.

Instead of interacting with a customer primarily when they need insurance or another financial service, Old Mutual can potentially become part of their everyday banking activity.

That creates a much more frequent relationship.

The strategy is shifting from “right to win” to banking profits

Old Mutual initially approached banking cautiously.

The first objective was essentially to establish whether it had a credible opportunity to compete in the sector.

The speed at which OM Bank has acquired customers has now changed that calculation.

Old Mutual CEO Jurie Strydom said the group is moving from establishing its “right to win” in banking toward actively competing for a share of the industry's profits and turning OM Bank into a growth engine.

That represents an important change in the group's strategy.

OM Bank is no longer being treated simply as another service that Old Mutual can offer customers.

It is increasingly being positioned as a central part of the company's broader financial ecosystem.

The real opportunity is keeping customers inside the ecosystem

For Old Mutual, the value of a banking customer extends beyond the money sitting in a bank account.

A banking relationship can generate information about how customers receive income, spend money, save, borrow and move funds.

Those interactions can create opportunities for other financial products.

OM Bank can potentially introduce customers to Old Mutual's insurance, savings, investment and other financial services, while existing Old Mutual customers can be directed toward banking products.

OM Bank CEO Clarence Nethengwe has described the strategy as leveraging the group's existing businesses for their distribution, customers and financial flows.

In other words, Old Mutual does not have to build every customer relationship from scratch.

It can use the relationships it has already spent decades developing.

That could become one of OM Bank's biggest competitive advantages.

Branches still matter in a digital banking strategy

OM Bank is being positioned as a modern banking platform, but Old Mutual is not abandoning its physical infrastructure.

The group has an established branch network that can support customer acquisition and engagement, particularly among consumers who may be less comfortable relying entirely on digital channels.

This creates a hybrid distribution model.

The app provides the digital experience, while Old Mutual's existing physical presence and financial advisers can help bring customers into the ecosystem.

For a bank targeting mass-market consumers, that combination could be particularly useful.

It also allows Old Mutual to use assets it already owns rather than attempting to recreate an entire banking distribution network.

The next challenge is not customer acquisition. It is customer activity.

Getting one million people to open accounts is one milestone.

Getting enough of them to actively use those accounts is another.

That is now becoming one of OM Bank's most important challenges.

Management expects the bank's core banking rollout to be completed within the next six months.

After that, attention is expected to shift increasingly toward transactional engagement.

The objective is to turn registered customers into active customers who regularly use OM Bank for payments, deposits and other financial activity.

That distinction is crucial.

A large customer base can look impressive while generating relatively little revenue if customers rarely transact.

For OM Bank, customer activity could therefore become a more important metric than the headline customer count.

OM Bank has a 2028 profitability deadline

The growth is impressive, but the bank is not yet being judged purely on its ability to acquire customers.

Old Mutual expects OM Bank to reach break-even by 2028.

Management is targeting a customer activity rate of approximately 36% to 38% as part of the path toward that objective.

The bank also needs to demonstrate that its losses are narrowing during the second half of 2026.

That puts the company in a familiar position for rapidly expanding fintechs and digital banks: spend heavily enough to acquire customers and build infrastructure, then prove that those customers can eventually generate sustainable economics.

The next stage will therefore be less about how quickly OM Bank can add accounts and more about what those accounts actually contribute to the business.

Old Mutual has more than banking on the line

The stakes extend beyond OM Bank itself.

Old Mutual is one of Africa's largest insurance and financial-services groups, and the success of its banking strategy could influence how investors value the broader company.

A profitable banking operation would give Old Mutual another significant earnings engine alongside its established insurance and investment businesses.

It could also make the group's customer relationships more valuable by increasing the number of financial products that can be offered through a single ecosystem.

But the opposite is also possible.

If customer acquisition remains high while transaction activity and revenue fail to catch up, the cost of building the bank could become a drag on group earnings.

That makes the 2028 break-even target particularly important.

The bigger South African banking battle

OM Bank's emergence adds another competitor to an already crowded South African banking market.

Traditional banks have substantial customer bases and infrastructure, while digital-first players have increasingly challenged them with lower-cost technology and simplified products.

Capitec's success among mass-market consumers makes that segment particularly difficult to disrupt.

OM Bank's strategy is therefore not simply to build another digital banking app.

Old Mutual is attempting to combine banking with an existing insurance and financial-services ecosystem.

That gives the company a different route into the market.

Rather than competing solely on banking products, Old Mutual can potentially compete on the breadth of its overall relationship with customers.

From insurance company to financial ecosystem

OM Bank's one-million-customer milestone signals a broader transformation within Old Mutual.

The company is increasingly trying to connect insurance, savings, investments and banking into a single customer relationship.

If successful, banking could become the transactional layer that connects those businesses.

A customer could receive income through OM Bank, make everyday payments, save, purchase insurance and access investment products without leaving the broader Old Mutual ecosystem.

That would give the group more opportunities to cross-sell while increasing the frequency of interactions with customers.

It also explains why the bank has moved so quickly from being an experimental extension of Old Mutual to a central part of its growth strategy.

OM Bank's biggest achievement is not simply crossing the one-million-customer mark.

It is proving that Old Mutual can use an established insurance and financial-services ecosystem to enter a highly competitive banking market at scale.

But customer numbers only tell half the story.

The next test is engagement, revenue and profitability.

If Old Mutual can turn a rapidly growing customer base into active banking relationships and reach break-even by 2028, OM Bank could become an important new pillar of the group's business.

If it cannot, the one-million-customer milestone may ultimately prove more impressive as a growth statistic than as a measure of a sustainable banking business.

For now, Old Mutual's strategy is clear: OM Bank is no longer simply another product. It is being built as the financial engine around which the group's next phase of growth could revolve.