Botswana-born Pan-Africa financial services group, Letshego Holdings Limited, has registered an impressive growth of their digital platforms, leading to the Group's double-digit growth in pre and post-tax profit, according to their recently released financial results for the financial year 2021.
The Group's profit before tax increased by 11% year-on-year to P1.147 billion, and profit after tax rose 16% for the same comparative period, to P730 million. Net interest income was up 6% to P1.989 billion, total assets increased by 30% year-on-year to P15.8 billion, and customer deposits increased by an impressive 77% year-on-year to P1.2 billion.
2021 saw the commencement of Letshego’s second phase (the customer phase) of its 6-2-5 strategic execution roadmap, ‘Plan 2’. The second phase will run for two years and is characterized by focused investment into deepening investment and differentiating digital and tech enhancements with a view towards spurring momentum in end-to-end automation of processes, systems, and platforms.
In the first half of 2021, Letshego went live with its LetsGo Digital Mall in 10 markets, following successful pilots in Botswana and Nigeria. The platform increases customer access across multiple channels including web, USSD, WhatsApp, and mobile.
Letshego aims to build and evolve the platform towards its ambition of creating a company with an inclusive one-stop portal not only for Letshego products, saving, payments, loans, and lifestyle solutions but also enabling access to everyday facilities such as mobile data and airtime, municipal service payments.
Since launching the LetsGo Digital Mall, Letshego’s regional subsidiaries have been focusing their local campaigns to register both existing and potential customers. At the end of 2021, over 93,000 Enterprise Active Customers (EAC) had registered on the Mall, and loan applications submitted via digital channels increased to 78% by the end of the reporting period (End of Dec 2020). As of 3 March 2022, the Group has already tripled this figure to registering more than 300,000 Enterprise Active Customers.
Letshego is on track to achieve 1 million EACs by end of 2022. Enterprise Value is also expected to gain momentum with the ongoing addition of new products to the Mall, as well as the launch of flagship programmatic social impact solutions (including Affordable Housing, Agriculture, Education, and Health).
Other empowerment and people-first initiatives in FY2021 included the appointment of 131 individuals with digital and specialist skills to support delivery and ongoing strategic transformation as well as the launch of the LetsGo Digital Mastery program for external candidates, leadership development programs for both Executive and Managerial employees with Gordon Institute of Business School (GIBS), McKinsey’s Black Academy for 25 employees to secure global expertise, and the extension of Letshego’s online digital learning portal, where all employees have access to over 4,000 globally accredited training and skill-enhancing curricula. Currently, 71% of employees are learning off the Coursera platform with 45,423 learning hours logged during the year, averaging 26 hours per employee.