The digital bank's first full-year profit of R370-million comes as Discovery ramps up its bet on AI.
Discovery Group CEO Adrian Gore
Discovery Bank has turned its first full-year profit, and group chief executive Adrian Gore used the results to set out what comes next: a “super bank” launching in October that he has described as a second phase for the digital lender and the connective layer of the entire group, powered by AI.
The bank delivered normalised profit from operations of R370-million in the year to 30 June 2026, against a R68-million loss the year before — a swing of R438-million. Clients grew 26% to 1.57 million, revenue rose 31% to R3.1-billion, retail deposits 17% to R27.2-billion and advances 40% to R12.9-billion, helped by momentum in home loans, while the credit loss ratio improved to 2.71%.
Gore tied the swing directly to technology, saying “the use of AI technology has been tremendous”. AI and in-app channels now handle the bulk of the bank’s client servicing, Gore said, up from effectively all voice calls in January 2025, letting Discovery grow its client base while call volumes stay flat.
From October, Gore said, the bank enters “a second phase”, recast from a standalone proposition into what the results call the “orchestrating layer for customers’ financial and health lives”. He described the super bank as “not a transactional instrument, but an integrative control layer for a customer’s entire economic life”.
In practice, three things bolt onto the banking app: access to ecosystems spanning fitness, travel, fuel and food; the bank’s payment and anti-fraud “rails” underpinning every Discovery product, whether or not the customer banks with the group; and a bigger, unified Vitality shared-value reward across all its businesses.
The prize is cross-selling. Nearly 70% of new bank clients have no other Discovery product, Gore said, while millions of existing Discovery members do not yet bank with the group.
Management is targeting two million bank clients and R3-billion in operating profit before new business acquisition costs by FY2029, up from R865-million this year. The bank also topped the Ask Africa Orange Index for banking and has led consumer rankings before.
The other side of the bet is Vitality AI, developed with Google, which Gore is rolling out market by market: launched in London late last year and due in New York within a fortnight, with a growing pipeline of partners. It cost the group a normalised loss of R299-million, more than triple the R89-million a year earlier, as “investment spend in Vitality AI accelerated over the year”. (Discovery notes the line also carries other Vitality central costs, so it is not a clean measure of AI spend.)
At group level, normalised profit from operations rose 17% to R17.75-billion and Discovery lifted its full-year dividend 33% to 384c/share, cutting its dividend cover from five times to 4.5. The eye-catching 38% jump in basic earnings per share, to 1 936.7c, was flattered by two one-offs: a R1.46-billion gain on the early termination of the lease on its 1 Discovery Place head office, and the partial sale of its stake in US telematics firm Cambridge Mobile Telematics. Stripping those out, normalised headline earnings per share, the measure Discovery watches most closely, grew a still-solid 20% to 1 757.6c.
Gore set the whole strategy against a gathering global problem. Ageing populations, a shrinking base of working-age taxpayers and medical costs that persistently outrun inflation will, he argued, make healthcare unaffordable for most countries within a generation. Discovery expects the healthcare burden per taxpayer to climb by between 13% and 25% by 2030, and by as much as 49% to 98% by 2040.
People over 65 already consume about 3.4 times as much healthcare as those under 65, Discovery says, and technology, Gore argued, has so far made the squeeze worse rather than better. “In healthcare, unlike other industries, technology doesn’t bring costs down. We’ve never seen efficiency in healthcare. That may change with AI.”
“One of the only ways we can affect that is to make people healthier,” Gore said, arguing that compressing the years people spend in ill health, rather than merely extending lifespans, is the most powerful lever available. Because health and life insurers do better when “customers are healthier”, he said behavioural, data-rich insurance, scaled and hyper-personalised through AI, is one of the few forces large enough to bend the curve. Which is, not surprisingly, exactly where Discovery is focusing its efforts.
Discovery says its shared-value model returned R17.2-billion to customers over the year, roughly on a par with its R17.75-billion normalised profit from operations, and, on its own measure, saved 5.2 million life-years. —* (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media*
