TOBY SHAPSHAK: Unicorn Bank Zero is SA’s latest fintech success story

“Bank Zero failed to deliver on the hype it promised when it launched,” said one banker after the neobank was bought by Lesaka Technologies this week for R1.1bn.

This comment appeared in a News24 article that summed up it up with: “Bank Zero has disappointed, with only 40,000 funded accounts after seven years.”

I’m not sure I would agree with the editorial disappointment, nor the banker’s assertion that it “failed to deliver on its hype”. This is a neobank that just sold for more than R1bn, making it a bona fide start-up unicorn.

That’s not failing to live up to “the hype” in my book. It’s a pretty remarkable feat to have built a functioning neobank with all the associated long-winded regulatory approvals, get 40,000 bank accounts and over R400m in deposits, and then be bought by an innovative business trying to reinvent payments, Lesaka, a Nasdaq-listed payments powerhouse in-the-making.

Cue all of the “zero to hero” headlines that have appeared this week. If emojis were allowed in Business Day columns, now would be the appropriate time for the laughing tears reply. 

I often lament that not enough people who build things — iPhones, bank apps, printers and courier services — don’t use their own products. Or, as a Microsoft executive once described it to me, “eat our own dog food”.

My favourite banking apps are Bank Zero and Discovery Bank, whose AI-enhancements and account-hiding and 911 features are world-class.

If they did, they would fix the obvious user experience mistakes and numbskull time-wasting extra steps. I know Bank Zero’s founders use the app because it is filed with the intuitive and obvious enhancements you’d expect if the okes who built it still used it.

I test a lot of apps for my day job, and I know a new generation of apps when I see them evolving, as I have for the past 28 years of being a technology journalist. My favourite banking apps are Bank Zero and Discovery Bank, whose AI-enhancements and account-hiding and 911 features are world-class.

Meanwhile, the unimpressed banker, Radebe Sipamla, a co-portfolio manager at Mergence Investment Managers, added: “Perhaps in more focused hands under Lesaka it can do better, as I think Michael Jordaan was likely dedicating more of his time to Rain than Bank Zero.”

As it happens, I know one other person besides Jordaan at Bank Zero from her days at FNB, where she was the CEO of business banking. Lezanne Human is a modern-day everywoman, a trained mathematician who ended up in banking.

I’ve had some of my most interesting discussions about mathematical advances and testing the theoretical limits of human understanding with Human, who mentioned her mathematical obsession the first time we met at an FNB-sponsored art faire.

Because of my fascination with the biographies of physicists and mathematicians and the advances of science (I read a lot about scientific discoveries, even if I don’t speak maths as a first-language), we have stayed in touch.

Over the last few years I’ve interviewed Bank Zero CEO Yatin Narsai many times. He’s clearly smart and driven. Like Human and the other high-ranking FNB refugees who built Bank Zero with sweat equity, they have nothing to do with Rain — arguably one of the most innovative mobile operators in the world (which doesn’t even sell airtime, the voice-based progenitor to the WhatsApp world we all live in now). But that’s a topic for another time.

I sometimes worry that I use too many adjectives in my columns — a specifically verboten subject for the journalism lecturers at Rhodes University who taught me the first draft of newswriting. Journalists are meant to be objective, never subjective. But those adjectives are appropriate for Bank Zero. They are worthy of superlatives.

How do I know? I drank the Kool Aid and moved my business account to Bank Zero earlier this year. My conclusion: I’m an idiot for taking so long. Also, it’s free.

Bank Zero is everything I need for my small business bank account. Once it enables a few more features I will move Stuff’s account over too. Although Bank Zero is rudimentary compared to my current bank, and only available via mobile app, it’s all I need.

Also, it is “good enough”. This is a concept I have been extolling for the last 20 years about why innovation in Africa is such a successful model for the rest of the world. Who needs all the bells and whistles when all you want is the steam train? — to recall the steam-powered age when that metaphor was invented.

For 20 years I analogised buying a computer (then laptop, then mobile phone, then size of your TV) to buying a car. Most sales staff want to sell you a Lamborghini, when most of us drive Toyotas, I’ve written in innumerable columns. But it’s true. Most of us need the most utilitarian of products, gadgets or services — even if we aspire to being power users or Formula One drivers.

• Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za.