Inside Dis-Chem’s prescription for better rewards

For 23 years, South Africans swiped their green Dis-Chem Benefit Cards without thinking much about it. Points would collect, redemption would lag, and most shoppers left the till wondering whether loyalty is worth the plastic.

Dis-Chem CEO Rui Morais thought the same. “It played a role in driving loyalty,” he said of the old benefit card. “If you look at the benefit programme in comparison to other loyalty programmes in South Africa and you’re honest about the value that you’re passing back to consumers — it’s actually relatively poor in how much value it opens for customers.”

After more than two decades, Dis-Chem decided to retire the old loyalty model entirely. In its place comes Better Rewards, a reboot that promises instant discounts on more than 10,000 products from more than 140 everyday brands and potentially a billion rands back into consumers’ pockets in its first year.

The wake-up call 

Morais said retail loyalty programmes experienced a turning point when Checkers launched Xtra Savings in 2019, offering “deep discounts on specific items”. Consumer behaviour was shifting, and Dis-Chem needed to evolve or risk irrelevance.

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The company tested the waters through an “incubation hub” called extraRewards, Morais said, which gave healthcare policyholders an instant discount of up to 20% on everyday essentials. It has been running for two years.

Customers who joined the programme shopped five more times a year, and their spend increased by north of 35%, according to Morais. “That is a fundamental return driver for the way we think about Better Rewards.”

If 300,000 customers could behave like that, what would happen if every South African could?

A simpler kind of loyalty

Morais wanted a system that felt “accessible to everyone” so every Benefit Card holder would automatically migrate to Better Rewards.

It’s a clean break from the era of delayed gratification. The 2025 South African Loyalty Awards, which took place in September, confirmed that consumers were finished with waiting.

Shoprite's Xtra Savings is the engine of the Shoprite Group’s Connected Customer strategy and the largest source of customer sales, driving over 88% of turnover across 1,800+ stores and eight brands.
Every month, more than 48 million swipes unlock over R1 billion in instant cash savings — no points, no friction. Since launch, over R59 billion has been returned to customers’ wallets. The result: a 4.5x largerbasket for members and 62 consecutive months of market share gains, according to the Loyalty Award’s Winner’s Report. FNB’s eBucks, meanwhile, paid R2.3-billion back to customers in the past year and received six trophies for loyalty leadership.

Clicks was singled out in the Winner's Report for its innovative use of AI. Specifically, the use of AI models such as aiRecommend, to tailor offers and communications to individual needs, resulting in an
increase of up to 110% in engagement and doubling of incremental sales uplift from personalisation over the past three years. Creative automation tools such as Midjourney, helped Clicks scale personalised campaign delivery while reducing creative lead times by up to 70%.

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Amanda Cromhout, chair of the awards panel, said South Africa’s loyalty industry “is thriving with world-class innovation and brilliance – delivering performance that exceeds global standards”.

Dis-Chem, Morais said, wanted to be part of this league, but in a way that served health as much as the wallet. When discussing competition with dominant retailers, Morais noted that Dis-Chem had to “anchor around what makes you different and for us it’s the delivery of healthcare”.

Turning retail into healthcare

Better Rewards makes that philosophy tangible. A built-in “boost” feature gives customers an extra 5% discount for 30 days every time they fill a prescription or buy over-the-counter medication.

“It’s a specific behaviour that drives our ambition as an integrated healthcare provider,” Morais said. “The chronic [medication] space is super important for us because of the repeat nature of foot traffic.”

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Consistency is another layer of the strategy. Partner brands will remain stable, Morias said, so customers can plan and budget for essentials more efficiently. And the savings stack up – for example if an item is already on sale, the 10% discount still applies over and above the sale price.

Banking on partnerships

Better Rewards is part of a web of partnerships designed to expand access and engagement. Capitec, South Africa’s biggest retail bank, gives its 25 million clients an extra 5% discount when they pay with a Capitec card, bringing total savings to 15%.

Dis-Chem health and life policyholders target a base discount of 20%, but if they maintain strong health scores through annual HealthChecks, they can earn up to 100% off qualifying items, capped at R3,000 a month.

“The policyholder can shop on behalf of all members of the policy,” Morais explained. “The number of policy holders is essentially linked to your premium and we link the premium to the cap. So the more policyholders you have on the policy, the higher your cap, which means you can shop those discounts.”

The economics of behaviour

The programme was driven by Dis-Chem’s innovation engine, X, bigly labs, which Morais called the “analytical heart of the business”, adding that every brand in the discounted product list was chosen based on analytics.

Funding for the programme comes partly from redirecting external loyalty partnerships back into Dis-Chem’s own ecosystem. “We used to pay a lot of money to participate as a brand in partner programmes,” Morais explained. “In many of those instances we weren’t in control of whether that value was going back to the consumer.”

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Vendors now co-fund with Dis-Chem directly. “They see this as a market share opportunity,” Morais said. “We’ve modelled it, and there’s definitely north of about a billion rands over a 12-month period that will go back to South African consumers in savings.”

Healthcare crisis as opportunity

Private healthcare funding is cracking under pressure. Martin Rimmer, CEO of Sirago Underwriting Managers, warned that “a comprehensive five-year analysis of gap cover claims reveals a healthcare funding crisis that’s rapidly escalating”. Between 2020 and 2024, the company’s large (mega-gap)claims rose more than 500% in volume and Sirago found that claims exceeding R60,000 are daily occurrences.

Morais sees Better Rewards as a bridge between affordable retail and sustainable healthcare. “If you can drive chronic adherence, you can open up value in the health funding space. If you think about morbidity and mortality and what chronic adherence does to that.”

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His vision is a model where good health behaviour funds cheaper healthcare. “[When] we launched medical insurance, we wanted to make medical insurance effectively super affordable and almost as ambitious as saying we wanted to make it for free. And one of the things we tasked ourselves with is how do we do that.”

If the last decade in retail loyalty was geared towards collecting points, the next one seems to be focused on shaping habits.In other words, discounts have become the new advertising. For a pharmacy and retailer that wants to become a bigger player in healthcare, that may prove to be a smart prescription. DM

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