Fundamo Dairies — Building real solutions for big clients [Part 2]

The following article is the second in a series of extracts from South African entrepreneur Hannes Van Rensburg’s upcoming book, Cash In, Cash Out. The founder and CEO of the fintech company, Fundamo, recalls the events that have helped shape the world’s mobile banking industry as we know it as well as those leading up to the company’s exit to Visa for a whopping US$110-million.

In this article, Van Rensburg details the events when Fundamo hauled in its first big blue-chip client — the biggest bank in Africa. This was arguably one of the biggest validations in the company’s history.

The contract negotiations with Standard Bank became the responsibility of Johan Roets. At that stage, he had recently joined Standard Bank after an accomplished career as an entrepreneur. He had a large portfolio in the bank, but liked the idea of launching a new type of banking product based on mobile phones. This meant that he gave us a lot of attention, and I got to know him well. Contract negotiations with a bank can take very long because of complex compliance and risk management. Many people in the bank had to look at the contract, which became difficult to conclude quickly. As it was a suspensive condition for the conclusion of the acquisition of eZuza, Johan started focusing on this more and more. As one would expect of a good manager, he allocated the responsibility to one specific individual: a very capable person called Patrick Crooks.

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