So close {{ FIRSTNAME }}? The UK’s agriculture department spent £312 million (R7bn) over 2 years to upgrade its equipment to Windows 10, just in time for Microsoft to cut support for it. Nee man.

In This Open Letter

Tokenised stocks and shares are great, but there’s a unique approach to this that is offering a brand new way to think about this…

The stock market is arguably one of the greatest inventions of the modern economy, allowing investors to diversify risk while unlocking liquidity for businesses to scale.

But it comes with a hefty price tag. 

Industries vary, but public companies spend an estimated 1-2% of their market cap on being listed. Add to that the friction of proving ownership, with complex contracts and third-party intermediaries, and you see why playing in the public market isn’t as efficient as it could be.

The “secret game” you don’t see

Behind the public markets, though, there’s a whole other investment world called private credit (aka private debt) that we normal investors never get to see. It’s an exclusive club of private loans to businesses, real estate projects or specialised funds that typically offer 8-12% in annual returns.

It’s estimated to be a $2–3 trillion (R52 trillion) market, but retail investors can’t get in: It’s reserved for institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals only, requiring exorbitant minimum tickets and relationships. Unless we can find a way…

The tech to unlock it

We already know that tokenisation (legally linking a real-world asset to a digital “token” to prove ownership), placed on the blockchain, gives us a secure and transparent way to trade assets digitally.

And you can do it fractionally, which is how we retail investors can buy fractional ownership (parts of shares for smaller amounts) of global companies through local platforms.

But can you do the same with those out-of-reach private credits? An SA scaleup says yes…

Unlocking private markets

Altify is a South African-built investing platform that lets users buy tokenised private-market exposure with small tickets. 

We caught up with Altify Founder & CEO Sean Sanders, who frames the future of brokerage as AI-assisted with tokenised assets at the core, bringing private-market (such as private credit) access to retail with low minimums.

Altify is the product of a merger between Revix and Coinpanion, an Austrian startup building a similar product for the German-speaking market, with the two companies joining forces in 2023.

Sean says Altify serves 80k+ users and is regulated across multiple jurisdictions, with South African FSP and CASP licences and a Polish VASP registration.  But it’s all worth it as they see global asset managers rolling out tokenised funds while retail demand for yield is on the rise.

If the next wave of retail investing moves from single stocks to fractional slices of private assets, timing matters. The question is: Will South Africans shift from stock picking to owning pieces of private credit or pre-IPO equity as casually as they buy ETFs today? 

We’re watching this space.

Have your say…

Payroll isn’t just admin; it’s the foundation of trust, accuracy and growth…

Yet for most African companies, it’s still the weakest link.

Deel Local Payroll unifies HR, payroll and finance across every country you operate in:

✅ One source of truth, no conflicting headcounts.
✅ Compliance, tax and multi-currency complexity are automated.
✅ Real-time data and integrations that keep payroll running.

As Deel’s Heinrich Swanepoel puts it: “If you fix payroll, you don’t just fix the back office. You fix trust and the employee experience at scale.”

Built with PaySpace and trusted by teams in 42 countries, Deel Local Payroll is the cloud-native system designed for Africa’s most complex operations.

🏆 Million-Dollar Babies. The winner of Startup Club ZA and SA Future Trust’s Big Pitch $1 Million winner is Parent Sense. Congrats, Meg Faure and team!

📈 Lesaka’s Revenue Rockets! Kick-starting its 2026 financial year, FinTech Lesaka Technologies sees its revenue soar 10% to R3 billion. Despite reporting a small loss, it looks like the strategic acquisitions of Adumo and Recharger are clearly paying off. Nice one.

📸 Tinder's AI Chemistry. Tinder, facing nine quarters of subscription declines, is spicing things up with AI-powered Chemistry to decipher users' interests via photos and questions to help with AI matching. We might just see the funniest AI hallucinations yet.

🚀 Google's Moonshot. Google's Project Suncatcher shoots for the stars with plans to build solar-powered AI data centres in space with Starlink-style satellite constellations. Interesting…

🪪 Digital Licence Leap. SA may soon wave goodbye to plastic driver's licence cards, thanks to a new digital driving licence. It’s still undergoing testing, but man, that’s cool.

✅ The Stack. Founders need reliable tools, so our Founder’s Stack gives you company setup and compliance with Govchain, trust-building brand & comms with DoubleShift and more.

Yesterday, we showed you how stub gives founders smart accounting, asking about your bookkeeping. Most here are pretty jacked…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 💸 Flawless. My spreadsheets have spreadsheets (15)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📅 Updated... last tax season (2)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🫠 It’s all vibes and bank notifications (6)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🪄 Waiting for AI to just do it for me (1)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🫣 Yeah… I should probably go see what stub’s about (7)

Your 2 cents…

Ah, yes, of course, you can always spin out of an entity that already has all the business support. Good one, Ludwig! 🧠

☁️ Cloud Support Engineer @ Cloud on Demand

🐮 Senior Software Developer + 30 more roles @ Flash Group

🌳 Full Stack Software Developer @ Koola Capital

😎 Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) @ Matrix Software (Pty) Ltd

😎 Solutions Consultant @ Matrix Software (Pty) Ltd

🧑‍💻 Software Engineering Roles @ Octoco

🦖 Head of Sales @ OfferZen

🌮 Full-Stack Developer @ The Awareness Company

Hiring? Let us know here and we’ll feature it next week.

Small- and mid-cap stocks rallied after JSE leadership urged investors to back under-covered firms.

Data from Moneyweb (Fri 31 Oct 2025 → Thu 6 Nov 2025)

Gold held steady in SA as producers benefit from higher prices despite global uncertainty.

+0.30% (R 69 356.55 → R 69 565.34)

Data from Investing.com (Fri 31 Oct 2025 → Thu 6 Nov 2025)

Bitcoin slipped as post-rally consolidation and weak ETF flows triggered profit-taking across crypto markets.

–6.23% (R 1 898 989 → R 1 780 868)

Data from Investing.com (Fri 31 Oct 2025 → Thu 6 Nov 2025)

Ethereum tumbled as leveraged positions unwound and liquidity pressures hit sentiment after two consecutive weeks of declines.

–12.61% (R 66 667.4 → R 58 263.0)

Data from Investing.com (Fri 31 Oct 2025 → Thu 6 Nov 2025)

✍️ Tool to Try: Gorby is like Grammarly, just way cheaper.

🏙️ That’s Interesting: Only 11% of the UAE’s population are citizens; the other 89% are migrants, making up 90% of the workforce.

🎯 Next Level: It took this guy 5 hours to perfect this trick shot.

🍉 Hack: A visual guide to when to buy (and not buy) watermelons.

🌌 Wow Site: 20LY is an Elite Dangerous-style map of our local stellar neighbourhood.

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