If you run a startup in South Africa, employee benefits are one of those necessary headaches. You know you need them to retain good people, but traditional retirement funds come with admin-heavy onboarding, opaque fees and a user experience that feels frozen in the early 2000s.
This week, the township-empowering team at Fibertime and EasyEquities announced a partnership that quietly challenges that entire model.
Instead of another group pension fund, they’ve built something far simpler: retirement savings that employees can actually see, control, and use.
How the Model Works
Rather than routing retirement contributions into a traditional umbrella fund, Fibertime makes monthly contributions directly into each employee’s EasyEquities account.
Those contributions go into either a Retirement Annuity (RA) or a Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA). The money lands as cash. From there, employees choose how to invest it themselves, within Regulation 28 limits for RAs.
They can track balances, returns, and allocations inside the same app they would use for personal investing. And there’s no mystery trustee board, no once-a-year statement, and no sense that the money disappears into a black box.
Why This Is a Big Shift
Traditional employee benefits assume that workers shouldn’t engage too closely with their money. Contributions are deducted, decisions are outsourced, and engagement is minimal by design.
This flips that assumption.
By giving employees visibility and choice, Fibertime is treating them less like passive members of a scheme and more like active participants in their own financial future. For a workforce of around 100 people, that matters. Not just financially, but culturally.
In a country with structurally low household savings, helping people build the habit of investing (and understand what their money is doing) can be as valuable as the contribution itself.
Why The Partnership Makes Sense
This isn’t a random tie-up. Both companies have built their businesses around access.
Fibertime’s pay-as-you-go fibre model lowered the barrier to internet access in places where traditional contracts didn’t work. EasyEquities did the same for investing by removing minimums and enabling fractional ownership.
Combining connectivity with access to capital markets closes a loop. One gives people access to the digital economy. The other gives them access to the asset economy. Together, they turn employee benefits into something that compounds rather than gathers dust.
The Detail For Founders
There is no minimum employee count in this model and no advice fees baked in. That means: You don’t need hundreds of staff; a five-person startup can use the same structure as a company with thousands. And that extra advice layer of cost is removed.
For bootstrapping founders or early-stage teams, this model makes it possible to offer benefits that feel “corporate-grade” without the usual corporate friction.
This partnership is already live, and additional employers are onboarding behind the scenes. So this is not a one-off experiment; it’s the start of a repeatable benefits model for SMEs.
