Tag: festive season

It is that time of year again when you are swapping out your summer wardrobes for your festive season attire. You are having a long-overdue de-clutter and booking annual check-ups for the family. While you are at it, take the opportunity for your annual personal estate review to re-evaluate your estate documents and give the administrative side of your life a thorough spring-clean too!

The growing trend of stokvels and the seasonal withdrawals during the festive season requires members to be vigilant and careful. Often, stokvels are formed at the start of the year to enable spending in December. As a result, we observe most withdrawals during this period.

As the year ends, businesses face year-end fatigue and the pressures of the approaching festive season. This period, marked by heavy workloads and rushing to meet targets, creates opportunities for cybercriminals to exploit vulnerabilities. One prominent method is business email compromise (BEC), a sophisticated cybercrime targeting organisations via email system infiltration. A common BEC tactic involves altering banking details on invoices.

As the year wraps up, many companies start to slow down, with some even opting for a 'soft closure' so employees can take leave during the festive season. While the focus might be on finishing year-end tasks, this is actually a great time to think about your recruitment needs.

As the festive season approaches, the excitement of Christmas shopping is in the air. However, amidst the holiday rush, it is crucial to stay vigilant to avoid a nasty surprise of unexpectedly purchasing counterfeit products, which invariably flood the on and offline markets during this time.

Black Friday has grown in prominence in South Africa over the last few years and has fundamentally changed the way South Africans shop. While average spending in November has historically been higher than in the first 10 months of the year, it was always well below the traditional festive season trading numbers recorded in December.

As the year draws to a close, the festive season emerges as a pivotal juncture for both South African businesses and consumers, laden with anticipation and opportunity. With South African consumers facing financial hardships in the form of multiple interest rate hikes and fuel price increases, research indicates that South Africans are still projected to spend over R200 billion this festive season

In recent years, South Africa has embraced the global phenomenon of Black Friday. While, for businesses in this country, it's tempting to focus solely on the immediate potential that this flurry of buying activity presents, small and medium enterprise (SME) should take a much longer-term view of Black Friday, understanding its real potential to underpin long-term growth.

As a testament to the resilience and dedication of South African stokvel savers, we reveal that its customers' stokvel net deposits have increased by 42%. Since November 2019, our stokvel customers have continually increased saving via a stokvel surpassing the R8.3 billion mark in total member contributions.