Rizwana is fascinated by people – and solving conundrums. For Capitec’s people champion, it is the perfect combination of art and science.

“You can have a business strategy and then a technology strategy and all of those can typically be copied, but the one thing you cannot do is copy and paste people and culture and in my view that is exactly why people and culture remain a company’s most competitive advantage,” she says.

The 2024 CHRO Awards winner, of both the Learning & Development and HR and Technology awards, adds, “Personally, I love solving conundrums, I love solving challenges, and it’s probably the reason why I love doing what I do every single day.”

Capitec’s digital-first approach is deeply embedded in its culture. “The name itself – Capitec – derives from ‘capital’ and ‘technology’.

While these are core to our business, they’re supported by our values and CEO behaviours,” Rizwana explains.

“So our story is all about creating access to capital, and using technology as an enabler to do that. But it’s not the only thing that we do. We also have our values and our behaviours called the CEO behaviours, what we basically say is that every single person needs to show up at work as a CEO,” she highlights.

But it’s not quite the traditional understanding.

The “c” stands for clients first; the “e” stands for energy and inspiration, and the “o” for ownership, Rizwana explains.

Data the new currency

“So we fundamentally believe we have to put our clients first in every single thing that we do, whether it’s the internal client or the external client. But it always starts off with the external client and then we know from a people perspective if we put our own internal clients first, which are 17,000 employees that we serve, they in turn will put our external clients first,” she says.

“The energy and the inspiration really comes from finding your own energy from within to solve challenges, and the ownership is about that relentless focus on solving a challenge. So it’s a combination of the capital and technology being the foundation, combined with these behaviours, that really allow us to foster this culture,” she adds.

And while technology is literally seen as a platform for growth at the organisation, Rizwana noted that Capitec is ready to take the next step.

“We want to move from being a technology-based company to a data-driven AI enabled organisation. As Capitec continues to evolve, the focus is shifting from technology-based to a data-driven AI-enabled organisation,” she says.

“Data is the new currency. The companies that harness its full potential will lead the future,” Rizwana adds. Capitec has over 2.5 trillion client data points, enabling more than 50 predictive models to enhance decision-making. “By leveraging AI and data, we aim to increase decision-making efficiency by 80 percent.”

From an HR perspective, this shift isn’t just about hiring data experts – it’s about ensuring every employee understands how to use data effectively in their role.

The focus from a people perspective is really about getting the data agenda moving, she adds.

Simplifying processes

When she joined the company in 2021, Rizwana was asked: What do you want to do with the technology agenda?

She immediately saw the need to enhance SAP SuccessFactors, the bank’s cloud- based HR management system. Originally introduced in 2019, Capitec has since expanded its capabilities to include onboarding, learning, payroll, and performance management.

“This single-platform approach has simplified our processes, ensuring efficiency, safety and consistency,” she says.

But, for Rizwana, the work is far from done. “We’re just getting warmed up.”

An economics major, Rizwana landed in HR by default, joining JCI Mining as a graduate trainee on a mine about 50km outside of Witbank, before embracing the opportunity to join FMCG giant Unilever, where she also had her first management role in HR.

Rizwana was seconded to the UK to help build the Unilever research and development academy. She returned to South Africa to head HR for marketing before taking on the HR responsibility for both marketing and research and development across Africa, Middle East and Turkey.

In 2013, Rizwana took on her first global role involving a global HR systems implementation project across 106 countries, which was completed within 15 months.

Once that project was completed, Rizwana was given the opportunity to head up HR for the Unilever Nordics division, based in Sweden.

“Heading HR for Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland was truly incredible. At the time, I relocated to Stockholm and my husband chose to remain in SA, so it was a big decision,” she adds.

But these life-changing experiences did not detract her from believing that she would return “home”, so when she was approached by Capitec to become the first female executive on the group executive committee, she knew the decision to return to Mzansi’s shores was the right one.

She remains an avid traveller, though, who loves experimenting  and doing new and different things.

Deep-rooted values

Rizwana credits her great aunt who raised her for the first few years of her life as the inspiration behind her own personal purpose.

Back in the 1940s, most young Muslim girls in South Africa were taken out of high school and basically given household duties till the time they got married. For Rizwana’s great aunt, it was no different, except that she never forgot her dream to study further.

She decided to go back to high school at the age of 22, and went on to qualify as a teacher, which allowed her to become financially independent.

“She never married but when my grandfather passed away, she basically stepped in to help my grandmother raise my dad and his five siblings. And she could only do that because she was financially able to do so,” Rizwana recalls.

“Her journey instilled in me a passion for gender empowerment and financial independence through education. She proved that knowledge has the power to change lives, and that has shaped my own purpose in life,” she explains. “For me, I think that is one of the reasons I fundamentally believe that education is such a powerful tool.”

Everything Rizwana does is guided by a deep-rooted value system.

“One of the things that I learnt during the Covid-19 pandemic is the fact that not all decisions boil down to rands and cents, sometimes in times of ambiguity, when we go deep into our values, our values actually provide us the much-needed guidance and clarity that we need for a decision to be made, and I guess if there is something I would like people to remember me by it’s by the fact that every decision, everything that I did, whether it was for myself, whether it was for my family, whether it was for the company I work for, was guided by a deep sense of values,” she explains.

At the end of the day, it’s all about staying relevant for Capitec’s people chief.

“Technology is evolving rapidly and Capitec has embraced it at every level. Quite frankly, given technology’s rate of change, we can never say that we are done evolving along with it. We need to stay relevant and, in doing so, continuously grow our people at the same pace that we grow our business,” she notes.

Essie Moses is the interim senior writer for CHRO South Africa. She is a former production editor for Business Insider South Africa, and former managing and mobile editor for News24.com. When she’s not frantically chasing freelance deadlines, she spends time with her family, five cats and beloved dog. (She does not have an addiction to stray animals.)

This article first appeared on CHRO South Africa.