What was, was.

31 August marks Purple Group’s financial year end.

My late father had a saying. What was … was.

Charles used it back in May, writing about the farewell we gave my dad a few weeks earlier – a farewell, not a goodbye, because perhaps that’s what a good long life earns you.

He also referenced something else that day that I often say: 1 + 1 = 22.

Not a formula. An expectation.

That when you hold different things properly, instead of picking one and discarding the rest, they don’t just add up. They multiply.

That’s the only way I know how to write this blog.

Not a highlights reel.

A holding of things.

The (unaudited) numbers, because they’re the easy part

As at 26 August, our group NAV sits at around R106 billion – remember our community guessing when we’d reach R100 billion?!

Retail alone has crossed R70 billion for the first time. Institutional sits at roughly R36 billion. Every product line is up month-to-date, showing the broadest August we’ve had.

Back it up six months to our interim results for the period ended 28 February: revenue up 8.8% to R258.5 million, operating expenses up just 0.5% and profit before tax up more than 30%. Active clients passed 1.24 million and client assets reached R94.9 billion, up 41.2% year on year.

None of this is a story I or any one person gets to take credit for.

It’s a story about compounding.

The same as my 1 + 1 = 22, except here it’s client data, distribution, product innovation, partnerships and a decade of showing up for first-time and experienced investors. Delivering on a strategy driven by our CEO Charles Savage.

Two things happened this year that I think we’ll look back on as inflection points, not just news cycles.

In July, we agreed to acquire Telescope AI – the team behind our AI Baskets, now reaching more than 3 million investors across seven countries.

Luc Pettett joins us as Chief AI Officer, with a minimum five-year commitment, while keeping Telescope’s brand, team and independence intact.

He’d built something genuinely world class. And he chose to build its next chapter with us. Already Luc and his exceptional team have made massive contributions.

Charles’s read on why Telescope chose us still sits with me: no model can replicate what we’ve learned, over a decade, about how ordinary people start, stumble, learn and grow as investors.

That’s the asset.

The AI is just what we’re pointing at it now.

In August, Absa joined the Easy family – more than 12 million clients getting direct access to invest through the Absa app from launch this September.

Roughly 125 000 EasyEquities clients already bank with Absa. Another 30 000 are Absa shareholders.

This isn’t a new idea for us. Capitec and Discovery Bank proved the model.

But the scale here is also compounding.

And then there’s Philippines, which is the one that perhaps tests my patience most and teaches me the most in equal measure.

I’m now President of EasyEquities Philippines. We’re live in a regulated sandbox with GCash – an exceptional brand and partner and a business one can’t help but admire – real users transacting in production, working toward a big target by the end of 2027 in a country of 115 million people.

It is taking longer than any of us want. There are stunbling blocks.

I said as much to our own team a few weeks back, plainly: we have not been good enough, internally, at project-managing and communicating this relationship.

That’s not a knock on effort – the work and the passion are real – it’s a gap I own.

The excellent Philippine SEC wants the same thing we want: more Filipinos investing, safely, faster.

That alignment is rare, and it’s worth the patience it demands.

It’s also a joy working with some awesome EasyEquities team mates in Manila – people who are every bit as impatient as I am and who are putting in the work to deliver something exceptional.

The people part

We are, group-wide, under 300 people.

We serve more than 1.3 million active clients and reach over 3 million registered users.

I don’t know a cleaner way to say what that ratio means than to just say it: it’s a privilege, and most days it doesn’t feel like work so much as it feels like the thing I was supposed to end up doing.

I’m Chief Enablement Officer at Purple Group.

My job, on the days it’s working, is to remove whatever is standing between our people and the thing they’re best at.

Some days that’s HR. Some days that’s brand. Some days something quite unexpected.

Many days it’s just getting out of the way.

Thank you to the team, led by our superb CEO Charles Savage. My best disagreements are still with Charles as he continues to push and challenge us to do better. To be better.

My HR, marketing, growth, legal, finance and compliance and other teams I engage with daily – thank you. BIG Time.

The BI team who give us the daily deposit read (and much else besides) – data really is our lifeblood when it comes to making decisions.

The partnerships team ensuring we remain an excellent partner.

The people in Manila working sandbox hours around a regulator’s calendar.

And the many team mates in South Africa, Europe and Australia doing important work every day that doesn’t find its way into a blog, a launch announcement or a results presentation. You are seen and appreciated.

Thank you.

Thank you to our shareholders, who backed this when the model was still being proven and are still backing it now that it’s compounding.

Thank you to our partners – Absa, Capitec, Discovery, Satrix, GCash, Telescope and the many other names.

Partnership only works when both sides are occasionally uncomfortable together.

And thank you to the families of everyone on this team.

The person who covers bedtime when a launch slips. The person who doesn’t ask why the WhatsApp is still lit up at 9pm during audit season.

That labour is invisible on an org chart.

It is not invisible in our culture.

On the parts that aren’t in a spreadsheet

Charles wrote something else in May (those Savage Takes are required reading, I tell you!) that I keep coming back to, because it says out loud a thing I think we underplay as a business.

We talk about investment. Ownership. NAV.

But millions of people in our community are dealing, at the same time, with things no spreadsheet touches.

My dad’s death this year was one of those things for me.

What I felt, in the weeks after, wasn’t really about grief in isolation – it was about how many people around me, inside and outside this company, showed up without being asked to.

That’s part of what community means.

 

What we expect of ourselves

We are a company and a brand that expects high self-delivery.

That’s not a slogan. It’s a standard.

Own your career the way you’d want a client to own their portfolio: with intent, not by default.

Own your finances the same way.

Nobody is coming to do either of those things for you, and we don’t build products that pretend otherwise.

We have tolerated mediocrity in pockets before.

We shouldn’t have.

Our job now is not to lower the standard in the name of kindness, but to give good people the clarity, tools and support to do excellent work – and then expect them to do it.

Empowerment without accountability and support isn’t empowerment.

It’s avoidance.

 

Last thing

Our audited annual financial statements are expected out sometime in November.

Between now and then, our finance team – and everyone supporting them through the audit – has the hardest, least visible stretch of the year ahead of them.

Good luck.

Thank you in advance for the hours.

There’s a lot still to do. How lucky are we?!

Lots we’re still getting wrong, or getting slowly.

Philippines will teach us that lesson again before it teaches us the other one.

But tomorrow the books close on a year I’m proud of, built by fewer than 300 people who chose, every day, to hold the hard parts and the good parts together rather than picking one.

What was… was.

Stay Easy. Now we compound!