South African fintech startup Fynbos Money has built an investment platform that enables anyone to get the basics of long term investing right themselves without wasting money on platform or advice fees.
Founded early last year, Fynbos Money offers a free emergency savings account – backed by the Allan Grey Money Market fund – and a free tax-free savings account with a choice of five top-tier global equity funds. It then offers a paid tier with additional features such as family accounts and additional savings pots and fund choices.
“The platform is designed to make investing easy to understand by distilling the basics of long term wealth building into a platform that does it all for you without charging a share of your investment as a fee,” co-founder Adrian Hope-Bailie told Disrupt Africa. “Instead we are trying to disrupt the way financial service providers structure their fees by only charging a flat subscription fee.”
The team has been working together for over three years building other financial products for the US and European markets.
“We started building Fynbos Money in early 2024 because we wanted to solve a problem that we were personally affected by and that we saw impacting many of our friends and family,” said Hope-Bailie.
“We did some early experiments to test some hypotheses we have about what the root cause of those issues are, and they were really promising, so we decided to go all in on this since mid-2024.”
Investing for the long-term, he said, is “grossly misunderstood”, yet much simpler than most people think.
“The trouble is it’s boring and so it’s hard to “sell” people on the right solution,” Hope-Bailie said.
“The investment industry thrives on the complexity it creates. Layers of intermediaries each take a cut of the money that flows into the system and the majority of asset managers rely almost entirely on intermediaries for their distribution. The majority of retail customers don’t know where to start if they want to DIY.”
Easy Equities is one platform that solves this, but Hope-Bailie said it is still too complex, and lacks structure or guidance, while traditional financial advisors are “incentivised to sell products to their customers that they don’t need”.
“We see a gap to build a financial services brand that operates in that middle ground. Our goal is to build a trusted brand by offering a best in class product that is a delight to use, provide great customer service, and simply do what’s right for the customer,” he said.
“Instead of charging a fee based on assets under management we will charge a flat fee for access to the platform but also provide a free tier for anyone that is just starting and doesn’t need the more advanced features we have in the pipeline.”
Fynbos Money got its initial funding from the team’s previous employer.
“The team used to be the Cape Town office for a US business that shut down its operations in early 2024. They gave us some seed funding to build a digital wallet that was key to their plans to build a micropayments ecosystem for paid content,” Hope-Bailie said.
“When they decided to call it quits we lost our main distribution partner so we started looking for something closer to home that we could apply our skills to. Since pivoting into this product we’ve negotiated a sale of the IP we built previously which has helped us get some runway for this project.”
Uptake, he said, has been strong.
“We started with a friends and family pilot in October and have been growing steadily from there. We’re just over 2,000 users now and are seeing great growth week-on-week,” Hope-Bailie said.
“It’s still very early but the signs are positive. We know we have our work cut out as our business model requires scale so we’re busy doing a lot of experiments to figure out the best marketing and distribution channels.”
Fynbos Money has a strong focus on the tax-free savings account, which Hope-Bailie said is massively underutilised in South Africa, meaning it is very locally-focused for now.
“An expansion to other markets would be a different proposition, but we know there is a big opportunity to offer a product like ours in a lot of developing markets so expansion is not off the table. But it’s not a focus at all right now,” he said.
With its primary revenue stream being subscriptions, Fynbos Money aims to have a few thousand paying subscribers by the middle of this year in order prove product-market fit.
“We have a lot of other revenue plans but they really build off of this wedge which we are still trying to establish. The grand vision is a financial services brand that fills what we consider to be a major gap in the market. Investing is our beachhead product but we have others in mind if we can get to the user numbers we are hoping for,” Hope-Bailie said.
