Charles Savage on Scaling Easy Equities and Backing ZARU

From a nine-cent share price to R90bn on platform

Easy Equities today is a business at scale, and Savage laid out the numbers plainly. The platform holds 90 billion rand in assets, a figure that has compounded at 30% a year over 11 years, which he called remarkable given that it is retail customers growing their wealth. The group serves 1.2 million customers and grew its active base by roughly 15% in the last financial year, up from 11 to 12% the year before. Results published in November, he said, durably evidenced the group's profitability and a shift in its scale and trajectory.

The reach of the product set is unusually wide for a team he puts at 250 staff. Beyond South African and international equities, Easy Equities now spans asset management, a life insurance business called EasyProtect, securitised credit against portfolios, a fractional private markets platform in EasyProperty, an FX capability, and Easy Crypto. Savage is careful to frame this as a scale-up rather than a startup. The business is, in his words, at scale, growing fast, and still innovating through new products and geographies, with beta operations open in Kenya and a regulatory sandbox in the Philippines in partnership with GCash.

Why public failure built the business

The resilience behind that growth was forged in a very public collapse. Savage took over as CEO of Purple Group in November 2007, and on 14 February 2008 the group was put into business administration. The share price, which had been two rand when GT247 was acquired, reached nine cents at one point. The South African business was eventually recapitalised while the other operating entities were shut down. It took another five years before the idea of Easy Equities was born.

That experience shapes how Savage runs product today. He is blunt that a win ratio for new products is, at best, three or four out of ten, so the strategy has to take what he calls a shotgun approach: start with genuine customer needs, build fast, and accept that most bets will fail without doing harm. The discipline is to build ten products every decade and try to be more successful than the last. In the previous decade, he says, the group scaled four businesses to profitability; the ambition for the next is to beat that number.

Breaking things without breaking trust

Moving at that pace means things break, and Savage does not pretend otherwise. We break things every day, he told the audience, and framed the relationship with customers as a mutual bargain: they expect the group to move faster and meet more needs, which means accepting that things will occasionally drop. The obligation on Easy Equities is to ensure no harm is done and to fix problems quickly, while the obligation on customers is to be vociferous in flagging them.

The alternative, he argues, is stagnation. A customer who wants only stability and security can move to another bank; Easy Equities competes on product velocity, innovation and growth, and has to deliver both speed and safety at once. He describes building ABS braking systems for people who like to drive fast cars, and a net beneath the trapeze artists, so that risk appetite is enabled without harm to a customer, an employee or a partner.

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The ZARU stablecoin and the case for tokenised finance

The headline news of the day was ZARU, the stablecoin Easy Equities has joined as a founding partner alongside Sanlam, Luno and Lesaka. Savage was candid that this was a pivot. A year earlier, stablecoin would not have been in his hand of cards, but a wave of supportive US crypto regulation from April, faster than anyone predicted, changed the game. He gave his head of crypto, Earle Loxton, a mandate to find partners who saw the world the same way, and within six months the founding partnership was formed.

He explained the mechanics for the audience. Unlike Bitcoin, a stablecoin runs on the same underlying technology but is backed by the currency it represents: every rand of ZARU issued is matched by one rand held in reserve as cash and fixed income instruments, with Standard Bank and the auditors confirming reserves and Sanlam ensuring the one-to-one custody. The business case is faster, cheaper settlement. Where capital markets settle T plus one to T plus three today, stablecoin's default mode is real time. Savage sees this as the first leg of a broader shift: he believes every financial instrument, from shares to ETFs to property, will ultimately be tokenised, but only after stablecoin is successfully adopted first.

On competition, he expects South Africa to support two or three players owning around 80% of the market, with perhaps a hundred others sharing the rest. The winners, he argues, will be those with the highest trust, integrity, distribution and use cases, because fundamentally this is people's money and trust is everything.

AI as the operating system for the next decade

Savage's conviction on AI is his strongest note. The last decade, he argues, was won by businesses that took old-world models and stripped out friction through a better user experience, the smartphone being the clearest example. The next decade, in his view, will be won by those who lead AI first, in everything from creating a will to detecting fraud to building products.

He frames the return in concrete terms. If the return on human capital is one to one today, the evidence at Easy Equities is that the same person partnered with AI is two to three times more effective. For a 250-person business, the opportunity is to get the output of 750 staff, and he expects the multiple to rise fast, potentially to 10x within a year. Crucially, he casts this as an accelerant rather than a cull: unlike large corporates such as Amazon and Google that are reducing headcount, growth-oriented Easy Equities wants to keep and reward its people while doing more. He is unequivocal about the significance, saying he is more excited about AI than he was about the internet in 2000 or smartphones in 2004, and that in 20 or 30 years it will be seen as the greatest innovation of the last hundred years.

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How does a stablecoin like ZARU actually differ from Bitcoin?

A stablecoin runs on the same underlying technology as Bitcoin but is fully backed by the currency it represents, which is what removes the volatility. For every rand of ZARU issued, one rand equivalent is held in custody as cash and fixed income instruments, with Standard Bank and auditors confirming the reserves and Sanlam ensuring the one-to-one backing. The value it unlocks is faster, cheaper settlement: its default operating mode is real time, against the T plus one to T plus three cycles that capital markets and bank transfers run on today.

Should scale-up founders avoid listing on public markets?

Savage says there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Being listed forces hard disciplines, since decisions are reviewed publicly every six months, which he calls an unfair window for a startup but one that builds efficiency and urgency. The trade-off is real: he wonders aloud how much faster the group could grow if it could freely redeploy the roughly 100 million rand of free cash flow it generated, given that South African investors want both growth and returns rather than pure growth. But listing also gave Purple Group around 150,000 shareholders, up from fewer than a thousand, whom he describes as warriors defending the brand. His practical point is that South Africans cannot be too discerning about where capital comes from, so the answer is often a blend of public and private.

How fast will AI change financial services?

Savage expects the change to exceed most expectations across the next 12, 24 and 36 months, leaving no area of financial services untouched. He predicts that within 24 months there is a high probability most of the group's code will be written by AI, and 40 to 60% within 12 months. Customer engagement, he says, will be agentic-driven within three months. He points to areas long untouched by technology, such as asset management, as ripe for radical disruption, and cites reports of hundreds of analyst roles already displaced by AI as an early signal of what is coming.