Went through a lot of effort over the past few days to get my African Bank CC set up. Just thought I'd give a recollection of my experience, even if only for reference purposes.
Unless you have a very specific reason for doing so (as pointed out in some previous posts), I would strongly recommend agains using AB. They are not a traditional transactional bank like FNB, ABSA, etc. They specialize is small loans, and have only recently started offering a credit option. Most of the staff that I've encountered at various branched don't really know what credit is or how it works. It is very difficult to get information for anyone.
They have two options for credit, silver and gold (blue for existing customers, but I don't believe it is available for new applications). It is notoriously difficult to secure approval for either options. They seem very averse to risk, and will only approve if your living costs are much much lower that your income. They are no clear requirements for either card. They enter your salary and monthly expenses into their system and it generates an offer. You can either take it or leave it.
The silver and gold options are very similar apart from the following:
- The interest rates on the gold card are slightly lower
- The silver card requires a fixed monthly deposit into CC account, even if no credit is used. The account and life insurance fees are deducted from this fixed amount, the rest is paid into your account.
- For the gold account, you are only required to make payments if you have used some portion of your credit and your account shows a negative balance on either the 1st or 21st of any given month (they seem to decide which of the two dates based on when your salary is paid).
As a final note, they've only recently implemented an online system, which at this stage seems very inconsistent. System is down quite often and not all that easy to subscribe to.
