TFG Rewards: 39.9 million members. 82.2% of sales. Best Use of Technology Worldwide. But the real threat is not from fashion.

The programme that became an operating system.

The Foschini Group is a South African retail institution. Founded in 1924, it now operates 34 brands across fashion, lifestyle, jewellery, homeware, and sportswear. Foschini, Markham, Jet, Sportscene, Totalsports, @home, American Swiss, Exact, Sterns. Brands that are present in nearly every major mall in the country.

At the centre of TFG's customer strategy sits TFG Rewards. With 39.9 million members (FY2025), it is one of the largest loyalty programmes in South Africa by membership. More importantly, those members drive 82.2% of TFG Africa sales, are 1.4 times more valuable than unknown customers, and show 64% higher shopping frequency.

TFG won Best Use of Technology Worldwide at the 2025 International Loyalty Awards in Dubai. Fionna Ronnie, Head of Customer and Loyalty, was named SA Loyalty Personality of the Year 2024. The programme won at the International Loyalty Awards in both 2024 and 2025.

By any standard measure, TFG Rewards is best-in-class.

But the competitive landscape around TFG is shifting. And the threat is not from another fashion retailer. It is from Pepkor Holdings, a company building something TFG has not: a closed-loop ecosystem that wraps retail, fintech, logistics, and banking around the same customer.

How TFG Rewards works.

The programme is built on three pillars, all self-funded from TFG's own margin. There is no third-party co-funding model. TFG's products are approximately 80% own-brand, with over 50% manufactured locally through vertical supply chains. The retailer and the brand are the same entity.

Credit is also a significant retention lever. In H1 FY2026, credit sales accounted for 27.4% of TFG's total sales, with the debtors book at R9 billion. A TFG Money account doubles as a Rewards card, connecting financial services directly to loyalty.

TFG also partners with GoTyme Bank (formerly TymeBank), which continues to operate kiosks inside TFG stores as of March 2026, even as it exits Pick n Pay locations.

Key metrics.

The 82% signal. 82.2% of TFG Africa sales come from known, identified Rewards members. That is world-class. But it also means TFG already captures the vast majority of its own in-store data. The next frontier is not inside the store. It is understanding what happens between purchases, and who else is competing for that customer's wallet.

What works.

TFG Rewards gets several things right that most programmes do not. The personalisation is real, not cosmetic. Running 120 billion data points through segmentation models to generate 8 tailored offers per member across 30+ brands is a genuine data science operation, not a marketing slide. The programme is deeply integrated into the business. Fionna Ronnie's customer team does not sit inside marketing. It feeds strategic direction to brands, influences product decisions, and shapes the customer lifecycle across every division. This is not loyalty as a department. It is loyalty as an operating system.

The results confirm this. A 45% increase in profit per transaction, 47% increase in average transaction value, and retention above 60%. These are not vanity metrics. They show up on the income statement.

TFG's acquisition and turnaround of Jet has also been significant. Jet gives TFG a presence in the value fashion segment, directly competing with Pepkor's Pep and Ackermans brands in the same malls, on the same high streets, for the same customer.

The competitive shift: Pepkor's ecosystem play.

Pepkor Holdings is Africa's largest clothing and cellular retailer. Revenue of R95.3 billion (FY2025). Over 6,000 stores. 2 billion customer transactions per year. Its core brands, Pep and Ackermans, are household names across every income segment in South Africa.

For years, Pepkor was a simpler operation than TFG. Less data sophistication. No loyalty programme. A product-first, price-first model. That is no longer the case.

+more: the loyalty programme.

Pepkor launched +more in March 2024. A fully digital rewards card. No plastic. Instant savings across 20+ retail brands. Cross-brand data tracking. In 18 months it reached 13 million members and tracked 52 million customer baskets.

That is not yet close to TFG's 39.9 million members or its 82.2% sales contribution. But +more is not just a loyalty programme. It is the customer identity layer of a much larger ecosystem.

Flash: the fintech arm.

Pepkor's fintech segment generated R16.6 billion in revenue in FY2025, a 31.1% increase. That is 17% of total group revenue. Flash, the informal market platform, processes R60 billion in annual throughput across 175,000 active traders using 75,000 point-of-sale devices. It provides airtime, data, prepaid electricity, and payments to the informal economy at scale.

Pep Bank: the banking play.

In November 2025, Pepkor received regulatory approval from the Prudential Authority to establish a banking presence. It acquired Cloudbadger Technologies, a South African fintech SaaS platform, on 1 October 2025. In March 2026, Pepkor posted a job listing for a banking chief to drive the shift to a "fully integrated transactional-banking model" across more than 2,500 outlets. Richard Wainwright, former CEO of Investec Bank, was appointed to the board in December 2025.

Pep Bank will operate inside existing Pep and Ackermans stores. No new branches needed. The infrastructure is already there.

The closed loop. Today a Pepkor customer buys clothes at Pep. Gets airtime through Flash. Gets a loan through Capfin. Sends a parcel via PAXI. Tracks it all through +more. Tomorrow, their salary lands in Pep Bank. Every rand earned, spent, saved, and borrowed becomes a data point inside one ecosystem. That is the difference between a loyalty programme and a platform.

TFG vs Pepkor: a side-by-side.

The question TFG now faces.

TFG's loyalty programme is more mature, more sophisticated, and more deeply embedded in its business than Pepkor's. That is clear from the numbers.

But loyalty programmes and ecosystems are different things.

TFG knows what its customers buy inside its stores. Pepkor is building the infrastructure to know what its customers earn, spend, save, borrow, and send, everywhere. Once a customer's salary is deposited into Pep Bank, Pepkor gains visibility into their full financial life. Where they shop. What they pay for. How much they have left. When to make the next offer.

That is not a loyalty advantage. That is a data advantage. And it compounds over time.

TFG's partnership with GoTyme Bank is a step in this direction, but it is a partnership, not ownership. Pepkor is building its own bank. The difference in data access, product control, and speed of execution will matter.

None of this diminishes what TFG Rewards has achieved. An 82.2% identified sales rate across a 34-brand fashion portfolio is exceptional. The personalisation engine is world-class. The team behind it has been recognised globally.

But the competitive question has changed. It is no longer "who has the best loyalty programme in fashion retail?" It is "who will own the most complete picture of the South African consumer's daily life?"

That is the race Pepkor has entered. And TFG will need to decide how it responds.