The South African surfer who founded EasyEquities

Charles Savage went from surfing around the world to founding EasyEquities, which made investing much more accessible to South Africans and increased the number of investors in the country by 400%. 

EasyEquities is integrated into South Africa’s investing landscape, with investors across the board relying on the platform to access local and international stocks, cryptocurrencies, and bonds.

The idea to start EasyEquities was hatched following a few beers on a beach in Mozambique. 

“Interestingly, I wanted to be an accountant who surfed around the world,” Charles Savage explained on the Good Things Happen show with Jorian Murray. 

He thought that accounting was a global degree that would allow him to pursue his ambition. However, surfing was his real priority, “not so much the accounting”. 

Starting in South Africa, Savage spent 18 months travelling to countries such as Australia, Hawaii, the US, Spain, and Portugal. 

“That journey brought me home and had given me a wonderful global perspective.” It was also on this very journey, which happened during the 90s that he discovered the Internet for the first time. 

“I abandoned the accounting dreams because a very good friend had started an Internet start-up in South Africa and was building websites in 1996.” 

He had never seen someone so passionate about what they were doing.

In addition, while he loved surfing, he really did not enjoy accounting. Therefore, Savage decided to hang up his board and trade surfing waves for surfing the web. 

“I jumped ship in ’96 and started building, selling and marketing websites and essentially did that all the way to the dot-com bubble bursting in 2000.” 

One category, in particular, stood out to him: financial services. “I thought the internet was radically going to disrupt financial services at the time.” 

“Naively, I thought if you built the platform, then the customers would arrive. And we were naive around the ecosystem. The ecosystem just wasn’t capable of bringing customers to you.”

During the early 2000s, South Africa faced many challenges, making it very difficult to build the platform Savage wanted.

The ecosystem was weak, internet access was slow, data was expensive, and there were many unbanked South Africans. 

“But by 2013, those excuses had gone away,” Savage said. Data costs had come down radically, mobile money was in the system, banking had expanded, and smartphones were in the game and getting better and faster every year.

However, despite all of these innovations, they had underperformed their ambitions. 

“Fewer people were investing in stocks in South Africa than we had dreamed of, and we’d hardly moved the needle from 2000 to 2013.”

“I reflected on that and said, ‘Well if we don’t have the same excuses we had over the last decade and a half, what do we need to do differently to drive this democratisation dream that we had in 2000?’”

He happened to be on holiday with his family and friends when he considered this question.

In theory, these should have been the people to whom he could sell shares more easily than anyone else. However, none of them had ever bought a share from him.

“After probably one or two more beers than I should have had, I asked them the simple question.” 

Savage told them, “Look, there are only two answers to this question. Either you don’t buy shares because I’m a really poor salesman, or alternatively, the techniques, interfaces, and language we’ve used to try and sell you shares don’t appeal to you.”

The answer was overwhelmingly that it simply needed to be easier to invest.

“It was too sophisticated, too complex, they felt intimidated. We used a language they didn’t understand. They tried to use our interfaces and found them too complex and thought that something might go wrong if they press the wrong kind of button.”

“Well, what if we make it easy?” he asked. The response was overwhelming: “If you make it easy, we’ll buy shares.”

“The demand was always there, but the industry had failed to create an interface or a platform engagement strategy that made it easy for them,” Savage said. 

That was the problem EasyEquities aimed to solve with an easily accessible platform where anyone could engage with the JSE. 

“EasyEquies was literally born on a beach in Mozambique out of 15 years of failure, but a reaction on that failure and finally asking the audience that we were trying to sell to what the problem statement was.” 

“That’s where it started, and it’s been a wonderful journey.” 

Savage also found that the affordability barrier was keeping people from investing. Apart from being overly complex, shares were also incredibly expensive, potentially costing thousands. 

The solution to this problem was fractional shares. Simply put, EasyEquities would own shares in companies and allow users on the platform to purchase a part of it from them, meaning that you could buy a share for as much or as little as you want. 

Suddenly, someone with less than R10 could easily buy a stake in JSE giants like Naspers, Standard Bank and Anglo American. 

“Fractional shares serve everyone regardless of their economic background and allow you to start a journey with safe amounts of money in an asset class you don’t fully appreciate or understand,” he explained on the Kaya Biz podcast. 

Today, EasyEquities, which is part of the Purple Group, is a decade old and performing very well in South Africa.

When the platform was launched in 2014, there were only 250,000 investors. Now, there are about 1 million.

“We’ve quadrupled that from a retail perspective. So in a decade, we’ve increased the number of retail participation by 400%.”

Savage is still just getting started, though, and hopes to keep this momentum going well into the future. 

Through its partnerships with some of South Africa’s biggest brands, such as Telkom, Capitec, and Discovery Bank, EasyEquities now has access to between 65% and 70% of South Africans.

While the platform started as a “one-trick pony” where users could only buy South African shares, its offerings have since expanded to include shares from across the world, including Europe, Australia, and America. 

People can also buy property, FX and crypto and invest in unit trusts through the Easy Group portfolio, which includes EasyEquities, EasyProperties, and EasyAssetManagement.

“If you reflect on that decade, we’ve done a lot in a short period of time,” Savage said. “I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved.”