Investec Private Banking has quietly rewritten who qualifies for its Private Home Loan. If you're a high-earning professionals, or someone who's building toward that, this is worth ten minutes of your time. We know the banks. The banks know us. And this update tells us something useful about where Investec sees growth.

From "payslip-first" to trajectory-first

The old criteria were simple and rigid: prove your degree, prove your income, get considered. A three-year degree and R600k a year got you in under 30. Over 30, you needed R800k. No exceptions for qualification type.

The new criteria add a second door. If you're under 30 and hold one of ten specific qualifications, there's no minimum earnings requirement at all. The list includes Chartered Accountants, medical doctors with an MBChB, admitted actuarial fellows, four-year IT and engineering degrees, an MBA, and CFA candidates who've cleared level 3.

Two entries stand out because they don't require a completed degree. Actuarial students qualify with honours or seven exams passed. Graduates of an approved one-year programme qualify too. That's Investec backing professional trajectory over a finished qualification, for a narrow set of careers where the earning power is proven well before the piece of paper is.

It's not the “degree needed” story that seems to float around. This is a real shift from “show me the income” to “show me you're on the right track,” and for South Africa's talent pipeline, that matters.

The thresholds moved too

Two segments got meaningfully easier to qualify for:

  • Commission earners. The minimum dropped from R1 million to R800k a year. Tenure and track record still count, but the entry point is R200k lower.
  • Self-employed and entrepreneurs. Previously you needed a R10 million net asset value plus either R2 million personal income from the business or R2.5 million net profit after tax. The income side has come down to R1.5 million earnings or ability. The R10 million NAV threshold itself hasn't moved, but the assets that count towards it now explicitly include business and trust assets, not just personal holdings. For a lot of entrepreneurs, that makes the NAV bar considerably easier to clear.

Non-SA residents also now sit in their own clearly stated bracket (NAV from R150 million), rather than being folded into the foreign temporary resident criteria as before.

Why this matters for South Africa

This is a bank recalibrating around how South Africans actually get wealthy. Not everyone follows the straight line of degree, first job, steady payslip. A lot of the country's highest earners are commission-driven, self-employed, or built their careers through exams and on-the-job progression rather than a four-year lecture hall.

Investec loosening the income test for exam-based and programme-based routes, and lowering the bar for commission earners and entrepreneurs, opens the door to exactly that kind of client. It's a more realistic reading of where skill and earning potential actually live in this market.

The standard disclaimer that actually matters

None of this is set in stone. Every application still goes through a banker, and every client is assessed on individual merit, not just where they land against a table of thresholds. If one of our clients sits just outside these criteria, it's still worth putting the deal in front of Investec. That's the part of their model that hasn't changed, and it's the part that makes the rest of this worth knowing.

Get in touch if you'd like help assessing whether you fit Investec's criteria, or structuring an application to make the strongest possible case.