Bruce Whitfield: Tyme Group’s Coenraad Jonker on building a billion-dollar bank

We like to think our biggest decisions are rational, but beliefs and biases shape how we approach a choice, and how we approach that choice shapes the outcome.Coenraad Jonker was the young CEO of Africa’s biggest corporate law firm when an MBA class changed his life. Inspired by economist Hernando de Soto’s work on financial inclusion, he left law to pursue an idea most banks dismissed: that people at the base of the pyramid are bankable.That idea became Tyme, the digital banking group behind TymeBank in South Africa and GoTyme in the Philippines. It now has more than 25 million customers and reached unicorn status after an investment from Brazil’s Nubank.In this episode, Jonker tells Bruce Whitfield why he turned down a comfortable job in Sydney to lead a buyout of the business, how he steered the bank through COVID after 217 investors said no, and how close he came to being replaced as CEO of the company he built.It’s a conversation about conviction, character and the courage to keep going when nobody else believes in you.