What happens when your country breaches a certain level of prosperity? You 3D-print entire miniature cities for cats, because the future is miaow. 😽

From hardly saving to trading from almost anywhere on your phone (and making money in the process), the story of how SA’s FinTech “Robin Hoods” unlocked true wealth-building is insane…

Just over 10 years ago, it was nearly impossible for the average South African to buy shares in listed companies. Access meant going through a broker, with minimum transaction sizes and fees that priced out most retail investors. And buying fractions of a share? Forget about it.

Retail investment as we know it didn’t exist yet. And you could see it in SA’s saving (and wealth-building) figures: The household savings rate was a negative -2.4% in 2014, meaning South Africans spent more than they earned after tax, having to borrow instead of growing wealth.

In fact, the formal savings rate was only 26% in 2014, when only 15% used formal non-bank investment/savings products and a meagre 11% saved via banks.

Today, our formal savings rate jumped to 33% and first-time ETF user volume swelled and SA’s ETP market grew from R78.9bn (2014) to R225 billion by December 2024, meaning more everyday South Africans are now starting to build real wealth.

So what changed?

Well, it’d be unfair to try to attribute it to only one thing – the whole SA financial ecosystem made great strides. But one standout contributor who introduced a host of SA firsts and now helps nearly 1 in every 17 working South Africans buy and trade shares and fractions like never before is EasyEquities.

With nearly 1+ million active investors, part of a publicly listed company and managing R67.2 billion in assets, it’s hard to believe the platform only turned 11 this year – especially if you consider how very differently it was built from most “startups” we know…

To get the full picture of how revolutionary it was for SA, you need to go back to one day in the 1990s, to the Jammy steps (an everyday student hangout at the top of the Upper Campus axis) at UCT. A very young Charles Savage saw a fellow student trading stock on a mobile phone (very rare in those days, back when the JSE still traded with a multiple-day delay).

Enthralled, he cornered a website-building friend about this whole “internet” thing, and tried to open a stockbroking account, instantly running into so much friction (no online onboarding, broker gatekeeping and effectively impossible for a student) that he gave up on it entirely and focused on his studies.

Engineering the change

Good thing too, because Charles went on to become the CEO of what would later become the Purple Group in 2007. Taking a massive knock in the 2008 financial crisis was enough to re-ignite Charles’s passion for understanding wealth-building, and a perfect storm was forming: Web and mobile usage was about to start soaring (2010), the government and the JSE were looking for innovative projects to get South Africans into the investment game.

This wasn’t an SA-only movement, though. In the US, Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt were grappling with citizen access to investments, and in 2015, launched Robinhood (a $10 billion company today) to “open up Wall Street to Main Street”.

At the same time in SA, Charles and team were doing the same thing, except in a very non-Silicon Valley way: Instead of VC funding, they built EasyEquities inside the listed parent company (Purple Group), started with partner-led distribution and spearheaded legal innovation such as Fractional Share Rights (a first in SA) before going DTC.

And that is how you and I got the ability to buy and trade local and global stocks, shares, crypto, property or fractional, right from our phones.

How do you build something with such massive impact in SA?

That’s exactly what we’ll be unpacking, live and in-person with Charles at our upcoming event in Johannesburg on 18 September. We’ll learn from the CEO of two JSE-listed companies about:

If you don’t have a ticket yet, hurry – discounted early bird tickets are available this week only and moving fast. Plus: As an Open Letter reader, you get a bonus R50 off on top of that: Use the code TOL50 at checkout.

Get your tickets right here.

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📦 SAPO’s Murcan Parcel Pause. The South African Post Office has stopped sending parcels to the US indefinitely following President Donald Trump's revocation of duty-free access for international parcels. Just wait till the US runs out of biltong and Mrs Balls…

🤖 AI’s Growing Capabilities. Researchers at the University of Melbourne have developed Hespi, an AI-powered tool to help digitise herbarium specimens and unlock centuries of biodiversity data to accelerate research in ecology, evolution, conservation and climate science. Maybe now we’ll learn what the Colonel’s 11 secret herbs and spices are…

👑 Africa’s Property Crown Jewel. The Mother City has earned another crown, becoming the most expensive city in Africa to buy property. Real estate now averages R102’750 per square metre, with prices surging 160% since 2010. Yes, Dahling, Capetonians have known this for a while.

🎉 Celebrate Good Times. Of the seven countries surveyed by accounting platform Xero, South Africa has come out on top in celebrating milestones, with as many as 92% of companies reporting they currently celebrate or plan to celebrate milestones. We celebrate even more than the UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. Nice one.

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Founder life’s better when you build together. Last week, we had an in-person coffee meetup and a chat roulette round for members to interact, get to know each other and network a bit.

Seniority games. A joke about having multiple monitors, indicating you’re a junior in the company, didn’t hold up in the collab. Most of our founders work on two, three or more. 🤷‍♀️

Learning as we go. The collab analyses news like Takealot’s move into home loans, to find lessons and ideas — this time we had an interview with the company’s CEO, who told us all about that surprise move.

Moving faster. Sometimes all it takes to double your speed is an intro to the right person — we had 7 or so great connections in the Collab last week: Founders meeting the right peeps and businesses moving forward.

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Last Friday, we showed you how, using Spotify data, Big Concerts were able to sell out Lumineers concerts and book extra ones, asking about the worst part of the ticket-buying experience. For most, ticket prices bring the pain…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 💰 The prices (42%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😡 Ticket site crashes (6%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏃Shows selling out so quickly (16%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🥷 Ticket scalpers (6%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🍻 The beer line at the actual show kills me (30%)

Your 2 cents…

So true, Lauren. And we don’t know what it costs Big Concerts, either. 📀

Glad you liked it, Michaela. It makes our hearts so happy. 💚

Democratising SA’s Financial Access — JHB 18 Sep, 18:00 — The Open Letter is hosting Charles Savage, founder of EasyEquities and CEO of the JSE-listed Purple Group, at our next Joburg event. Come network, get powerful insights and make valuable connections. Early bird tickets are R200, but use the code TOL50 to get an extra R50 off, exclusive to Open Letter readers. Book here.

Venture Summit — JHB 9 Sep, 09:00 — SA’s largest gathering of tech startups and scale-ups lands at Sandton Convention Centre. Learn from top founders, sharpen your GTM strategy, explore disruptive tech and AI trends, and get funding-ready. The Open Letter readers get free access to this event by using the code TOL when RSVPing here.

Built with AI — CPT 4 Sep, 17:30 — Generative AI is moving from experiment to foundation. Hear South African founders share how they’re building real products: when to train, fine-tune or rent models, how to avoid the “wrapper trap,” and how to scale responsibly. At Innovation City, Gardens. From R50. Book here.

Escape 2025 — JHB 4 Sep, 09:00–16:00 — By technologists, for technologists. BBD’s annual conference dives into cutting-edge trends, live demos and a Game Jam showcase across multiple stages, with in-person and virtual speakers. Emperors Palace, O.R. Tambo. From R100. Book here.

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🤔 That’s Interesting: Antarctica has near-ice-free valleys and a bleeding glacier.

🔥 Next Level: The moment these two doggies become best friends.

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