Johannesburg - An additional 4 percent of the population had been brought into the formal banking system in the past seven months, the Banking Association said yesterday.
This means South Africa ranks alongside Argentina and is a step away from Malaysia in terms of banking its population.
Colin Donian, the director of the Mzansi initiative at the association, said that by the middle of this month over 1 million Mzansi accounts had been opened and almost the same number of unbanked South Africans had gained access to formal banking services.
Speaking on the second set of qualitative data available on Mzansi, a bank account designed to ensure access and affordability to entry-level clients, Donian said over 6 000 accounts were opened every day and with an average of R325 held in each account, about R325 million was being held by the participating banks.
PostBank continued to outperform the four major banks with 28.2 percent of total Mzansi accounts. Of the major banks, Absa has taken the lead with 26.9 percent market share, followed by Standard Bank with 22.4 percent, FNB with 15.5 percent and Nedbank with 7 percent.
The data showed the largest take-up of the account came from the black community and the majority of account holders were between 25 and 54 years.
According to FinMark Trust's FinScope SA 2004 study, 13.2 million, or 46 percent of the country's adult population above the age of 16, are currently banked, while 12.3 million, or 42 percent, have never had a bank account.
Donian said that to date, 91.3 percent of the Mzansi account holders were new to the institution at which they had opened their account.
"This is a persuasive indicator that the account is achieving its aim of providing affordable and accessible banking to the previously unbanked population, which is consistent with charter objectives," Donian said. But he said the achievement "is just a start in the grand scheme of charter objectives".
The financial sector charter requires banks to provide effective access for 80 percent of low-income earners and the poor.
Achieving this will earn a bank 4 of the 18 points allocated on the charter scorecard.
"I believe that this second set of data is a further indicator that we are generally on the right track," he said.
"We will continue to monitor data on the Mzansi account in order to ensure the product is meeting the needs of the target market. At the same time we also need to ensure that the product is not inadvertently transformed into the domain of second-order products by the continual addition of new second-order features," Donian said.