CLIENT

Retailability
INDUSTRY

Retail
EMPLOYEES

7,500
PRODUCTS

On-Demand Pay

95%

Estimated reduction in loan requests

10hr

Weekly reduction in payroll admin time on loan processing

Project Overview: Retailability

The Retailability Group is a South African-based group of retail brands with over 600 stores across Southern Africa including South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho and eSwatini. Retailability prides itself on bringing authentic and affordable fashion to its customers and its brands include Edgars, Keedo, Legit, Beaver Canoe, Swagga and Style.

With 7,500 employees in South Africa, their national footprint consists of approximately 450 stores. 

Like almost 80% of working South Africans, many Retailability employees were regularly seeking out payday loans, which come with high-interest rates and often lead to debt traps. Retailability wanted a safer and more sustainable solution for their employees that still provided them with access to money when they needed it most.

Challenges

  • Retailability was receiving in the region of 120 loan requests per year.
  • There were some rare circumstances under which the company would provide a loan, and when they did so, the loan process was time-consuming: The payroll manager had to get the employee to sign a loan agreement, load it into the payroll system, load and release a payment on the banking platform and set up a repayment schedule for the employee. Each loan would take, on average, 1 hour to process. This means that Retailability was spending on average 10 hours a month processing loans.
  • In general, employees seeking loans were resorting to loan sharks within their community who were charging them as much as 24% interest per month.

Results

95%

Estimated reduction in loan requests

10hr

Weekly reduction in payroll admin time on loan processing
  • Since implementing Jem, Retailability has saved their employees an estimated R4.5 Million* in interest that would have been charged by unscrupulous informal lenders.
  • With all of their employees having access to Jem, Retailability now only gets on average 5 loan requests per year, indicating a 95% decrease in loan requests from employees.
ON-DEMAND PAY
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“Jem gives our employees the opportunity and dignity to not have to divulge their financial situation to their managers. It provides them with access to funds in a controlled environment with small service costs. We would do a disservice to our employees if we were to stop using Jem.”

MALCOLM SMITH (CFO)

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