Helping savers take the next step to investing

Thomas Brennan is the CEO of Franc Group

Tell me about Franc and your role at the company.

Franc is a savings and investment platform that makes investing easy and accessible for all. As co-founder, I built the first version of the platform and built the business from the bottom up, but these days I’m more involved in product strategy and design, engineering management, recruitment and fundraising.

What do you think makes you good at the work you do?

I’m a generalist and a very fast learner. I think it’s important to see what trends (and competitors) are forming on the horizon and navigate accordingly, while building a team that’s passionate about solving problems.

What are SA’s saving and investment rates like?

Savings rates in SA are pretty high at 65%, but only 5% of those invest.

I think this situation has been caused by a number of issues: first, poor levels of financial literacy (it’s absent from our education), second, high barriers of access to investment products (high investment minimum requirements and advisers who prefer to service high net-worth/income clients) and, last, predatory and extortionate financial institutions that have resulted in little or no trust in the financial services sector.

So the reality is that of the 60% who save but don’t invest, 20% stick money under a mattress, 20% save with their friends (stokvels) and 20% leave their money in their bank where it earns little to no interest, according to Old Mutual’s Savings & Investment Monitor. Capitec confirmed this when they estimated that R300bn is sitting doing nothing in bank accounts (benefiting the banks, one might add).

Tell me about the R8m in funding that Franc has secured and what that means for the company.

Fundraising during Covid wasn’t easy. Yet, despite all odds, we were able to raise R8m, largely from offshore investors who recognise the opportunity of fintech in Africa, which is a greenfield market.

This capital has allowed us to grow our engineering team and expand our investment platform by exposing our application programming interface to third-party apps and platforms that want to offer their clients a high-return savings and investment wallet (powered by Franc).

Furthermore, we’re expanding the features in the app to make saving and investing fun and engaging (think sugar-coating your vitamins) and make it easier for Franc investors to help their children and informal employees start their saving and investing journey.

What did you want to be as a child?

My father was an engineer and a pilot, and my mother was a maths teacher, so I suppose I have the genes for solving problems. But in my early 20s I realised that the problem I chose to solve needed to have meaning too. Furthermore, I have always been a strong leader, from the playground onwards, so the thought of pioneering

something new was always my inclination.

I first leaned towards machine-learning applications in biomedical engineering (that was my doctorate at Oxford and postdoc at MIT) but then I realised that before people can care about their health they need financial freedom, and that’s when I started Franc.

What is your go-to career advice?

Never stop learning and believing that you can do anything you put your mind to.