Hard to believe {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? A new study found that when AI gets a female voice, people want to pay "her" less 😳. The participants were a mix of men and women, and both chose to pay the "female" AI less, based on work performance only. What?

In This Open Letter

Today, we launch Still Trending, a brand new content type in The Open Letter: we’ve been showing you new ventures for 4 years; and now, we’re going back to them all (every few days) to see who made it, why they made it, and get you lekker lessons on building from the guys who’ve just done it. Enjoy…

When we first featured Fynbos Money in Jan '25, they'd just started with tax-free savings accounts (TFSAs) – now, they've cracked pricing and revenue and are growing by 24% every month…

Just 21 months ago, Adrian Hope-Bailie and co-founders had built a smart debit order that kept your emergency savings topped up and filled up your Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA) allowance. Now, Fynbos Money is a full investment platform: a flat R100 a month (half price for under 30s) gives you expert financial advice (subscription and fixed-fee options), plus:

With assets under management (AUM) growing 24%% month-on-month and paying subscribers 22% over the last 6 months; churn under 4%, and NPS is 72 (targeting 90).

To do all that, Adrian had to double the team, but it's paying dividends: Fynbos Money is about to launch some new features — watch this space for announcements.

Fynbos today in Adrian's own words…

The 3 big lessons Adrian took from building

1. Trust is a function of time: Invest in developing your brand early, because its value (building trust) compounds over time. AI makes it count double, because people still pick the name they know.

2. AI will end information asymmetry: Most people paying 3% a year on an RA don't know if that's good or bad. The moment they ask their AI, they will, and that's when trust and transparency will pay dividends.

3. Build where your customers already are: People were already asking Claude about their money (Anthropic launched Claude for Financial Advisors in September), so Fynbos is working on giving consumers a proper tool of their own.

What's next for Fynbos Money

Adrian's goal is simple: when anyone asks their AI what to do with their money, the answer should be Fynbos. Next, the families feature grows into social saving, so you can help a parent, your domestic worker or your kids set up and keep tabs on their investments.

We're watching this space…

You can debug a funnel on a call, but you can't really work out whether to fire your co-founder, or whether the thing you’ve built is worth another two years of your life, in a 30-minute video slot with three other tabs open.

The Founder Collab runs in-person breakthrough sessions alongside the online cadence. Cape Town and Stellenbosch (for now): small rooms, real conversations, the kind where somebody says the thing nobody has been willing to say to you.

It's where SA founders get together to help each other make the big calls that lead to success.

There's one this Thursday at 9:30 AM in Gardens, CPT, and you should be there.

A developer in Ethiopia kept hitting the same wall with his work training: every AI study tool he tried shrank the material into a neat summary. Handy for the gist, but useless for the deep details that actually turn up in the assessments.

So he built Omnesia: it turns PDFs, slides, images and even recorded training sessions into detailed notes, quizzes and flashcards you can actually rely on.

The lekker clever part:

✅ Quizzes track your progress topic by topic
✅ Flashcards use spaced repetition, so the detail sticks
✅ It exports to PDF, Word, PowerPoint and even Anki

What's your team building, and where are you hosting it?

AI companies add new features every few weeks, and some wipe out thousands of startups in the process. The founder behind OfferZen killed many of his own ideas for that reason before landing on one that's AI-proof. So we asked him what test he used.

And it turns out, there are 5 steps to test whether the next AI model will kill your startup idea.

⚡ Joburg Wants to Pass The Bill to AI. City Power has gone to tender for AI to chase the R5.7bn a year it loses on electricity. Fixing the leaks makes sense, but nobody has answered the questions about this AI that matter most to residents yet…

🧾 R21bn Deal, Zero Shareholder Votes. Pepkor is merging Flash and Shop2Shop into a R21.3bn fintech, and some of its own directors objected. The deal itself isn't the problem. The R2.8bn stake its CEO walks away with is.

🗳️ TikTok For Safer SA Elections. TikTok and the IEC just launched an in-app election centre ahead of the 4 November local elections. Useful, sure, but SA's real defence against election fakes rests on something surprisingly flimsy.

🏅 SA's Fifth Peace Prize. Durban-born judge Navi Pillay has won the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, joining Luthuli, Tutu, Mandela and De Klerk. The legal precedents she set are why, and one of them matters more every year.

🚀 Global Reach Built. World-class futurist John Sanei has the insight but needs consistent global visibility. So FDC turned LinkedIn into a positioning engine that's driven 6.7 million impressions, 31k+ profile views and steady inbound demand from global audiences.*

🎯 One Customer, Not Five. Ask five execs to describe your ideal customer in one sentence, then count the different answers. That number is your drift. DoubleShift shows you how to build a brand for exactly one person.*

* From our partners. Find all the best service providers for your business in our Founder Stack.

Yesterday, we featured Amity's Shopify customer memory, asking about your relationship with the carts you abandon. And it's a dead heat…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🛒 I've still got items sitting in carts right now (44%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💸 I will only finish when the shipping is free (12%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🙂 I buy what I load. I'm not the problem here (44%)

On 13 October 1983, Ameritech Mobile Communications exec Bob Barnett made a phone call from a car parked near Soldier Field in Chicago, officially launching the first cellular network in the United States.

America wasn't first, though. Some Nordic countries had a network running about two years earlier, and Japan about four. Sometimes the most famous launch isn't the first one, just the loudest. 📞

Scaling Globally, Managing Locally, 15 Oct, CPT: OCFO, Sudor, Ruby Digital and Travelstart on growing offshore without losing control at home. Get tickets.

Cocktails & Capital: Backing the Backers, 22 Oct, CPT: Launch Africa's founders on where African venture capital is flowing and where it's retreating. Apply here.

Beyond Survival Mode, 6 Nov, CPT: Mental health practitioner Louise Niemann on why resilience and high performance are not the same as thriving, at Innovation City. Get tickets.

Powered by Radi. Want your business event in front of 36,000 The Open Letter readers? Host it on Radi, and it lands here.

🎨 Next Level: Time to take your boogie board to the skate park.

🕹️ Wow Site: Music Atlas maps the connections between musicians (the app’s a bit rough around the edges, but it’s a cool concept).