Bestselling author and broadcast legend Bruce Whitfield returns with a bold new News24 podcast. Bruce Whitfield’s Business Week won’t waste your time. Instead, each episode will focus on the one business news story that will change your world.
Listeners will also get investment and personal finance advice from top experts, and the inside track on SA’s most successful hustles. Join us every Thursday at 17:00.
Why Capitec keeps winning. Plus: The Courier Guy's locker revolution
In this episode, Capitec CEO Graham Lee joins Bruce to unpack another extraordinary set of results from South Africa’s most disruptive bank. With 16.5 million digital clients, a cost to income ratio that has dropped to just 36 cents in the rand and business banking growing at over 50%, Capitec continues to defy every sceptic. Lee explains why the branch network is not a cost but a competitive advantage, what fully banked really means and why he is more heavily weighting negative economic scenarios heading into 2027.
Craig Pitchers, CEO of The Courier Guy, on the last mile problem that has plagued South African logistics for decades and how 3,500 pickup points, lockers and kiosks are finally starting to solve it. With fuel costs at record highs, doorstep delivery is the most expensive way to move a parcel, and the shift to collection points is not just convenient. It is the future of the industry.
Helena Wasserman, editor of News24 Business, on the ports authority finally breaking free from Transnet, Goldfields making a bold half-trillion-rand bid for Australian miner Northern Star to become the world’s second largest gold producer, and the Gautrain getting new operators with fresh promises and French flair.
And Meryl Pick of Old Mutual Investment Group on the seismic knock-on effect of the Dangote Refinery IPO for Nigeria’s currency and MTN investors, and whether stock markets always fall in rate hiking cycles.
29 Sept 2026
Real-time money is changing everything. Is your business keeping up?
Most of us have stopped thinking about payments. You tap your card, tap your phone, and walk out. It just works. But behind that two-second tap is one of the most complex and fast-moving infrastructure systems in the modern economy – and it is changing faster than most businesses realise.
In this standalone episode of Bruce Whitfield’s Business Week, Bruce sits down with Chris Zietsman, executive head of Capitec Payments, to pull back the curtain on what is actually happening when money moves – and what the next three years are going to look like.
Zietsman spent six years at SnapScan, first as CFO and later as CEO, watching South Africa’s payment ecosystem evolve from days of clearing time to card transactions settling in two to three seconds – faster, he notes, than Mexico manages on a good day.
He unpacks the PayShap instant payment rail now enabling real-time bank transfers for as little as 20 cents, why Capitec can onboard a new card machine merchant in five minutes in any branch, and how the cost of card transactions has fallen from 3%-4% decade ago to below 1% today.
But the most compelling part of the conversation is his prediction about where the next competitive battleground lies: Not speed. Not price. Security. As friction disappears, so does the safety net that used to give defrauded consumers time to stop a transaction. The winners in the next three years, he says, will be the players who use AI and behavioural monitoring to protect clients in real time.
You thought you were just tapping your phone. It turns out you were participating in one of the most sophisticated financial systems on Earth.
This podcast is sponsored by Capitec.
To catch every episode, click the follow and subscribe buttons on News24’s Spotify, Apple, and YouTube podcast channels, or catch up on past episodes here.
23 Sept 2026
Poverty tax, Momentum’s billions and SA’s Formula One gamble
In this episode, Momentum CEO Jeanette Marais unpacks a standout year, with normalised headline earnings hitting R7 billion ahead of schedule, five business segments crossing R1 billion for the first time, and India emerging as the group’s most exciting long-term growth story after the health insurance joint venture with Aditya Birla Capital turned profitable for the first time in a decade. Eben de Jongh, founder of Skubu, joins Bruce to explain why it is expensive to be poor, and how his refill-based retail concept in Diepsloot is cutting prices by up to 60% through eliminating packaging and buying directly upstream. Four stores in, with a more compact format called Skubu Nyana in development, the model is gaining serious momentum.News24 Business editor Helena Wasserman reflects on Pick'n Pay tapping a former Woolworths executive as its next CEO, Remgro sitting on R22 billion in cash and feeling unusually bullish about South Africa, and Neal Froneman’s serious plans for a Formula One circuit near Malmesbury in the Western Cape. And David Shapiro of Otto 1890 on why AI is now the defensive play in global markets, Nvidia trading at a lower multiple than the S&P 500 despite a R5.5 trillion market cap, and the one thing that keeps him up at night about the sustainability of this market. This podcast is sponsored by Capitec.To catch every episode, click the follow and subscribe buttons on News24’s Spotify, Apple, and YouTube podcast channels, or catch up on past episodes here. Editions drop on Thursdays at 17:00.
Who has been a guest on Bruce Whitfield’s Business Week
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Van Zyl Botha
Claire Swanson
Graeme Korner
Helena Wasserman
Ricky Ruthenberg
Reach and audience
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Spotify
4.8 / 5
37 ratings
Contact Bruce Whitfield’s Business Week
Guest appearances
Books guests
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