Charles reflects on turning 53 - a year of growth, records, challenges and loss. From EasyEquities’ continued growth to lessons on leadership, family, wealth and time, it’s an honest look back at the year that was, and what still lies ahead.
Last week I turned 53 on the 18th. My mom would have turned 81 on the 15th. What struck me was how close those two numbers suddenly seemed. It's funny how age does that. When you're young, 53 and 81 feel like they belong to different lifetimes. Now the distance between them feels uncomfortably short. But perhaps that is the gift in it too. The passing of time creates exactly the right energy to get on with things. Especially when I'm not banking on 81. 😊
Birthdays have never been a big deal for me. But since turning 50 I have come to appreciate them more. I reflect on them more. And I certainly hold myself more accountable for what I said I would do against what I actually did.
The scorecard for 53 reads well enough. But frankly, it is the low-water mark for 54.
There is still so much to do.
The world gave us plenty to think about. AI moved from a technology story to an economic one, then from an economic story to something far more personal. It started changing how companies work, how people learn, how talent develops and, increasingly, how we think about our own value.
Wars widened. Tariffs returned. Oil reminded us that the old world still has the power to interrupt the new one. Inflation refused to disappear quietly and interest rates reminded investors that cycles do not end simply because markets have grown tired of them.
The Fed has just raised rates for the first time in three years. Oil is back above $100. The US 10-year bond yield has touched 5%. Gold spent much of the year telling us that beneath the market's confidence, fear was never very far away.
And yet markets kept moving. Capital continued to chase AI, data centres, semiconductors and the energy required to power them. Technology companies became larger, faster and more valuable. The winners kept winning.
Until they didn't. Then they did again.
That is the market. It has an extraordinary ability to make the obvious feel inevitable after it has happened, and impossible while it is happening.
South Africa had its own familiar mix of progress and frustration. Moments of genuine institutional recovery sat alongside infrastructure failure, political noise and the daily tax of getting simple things done. But confidence improved. The rand showed moments of strength. Local assets found buyers again. The market began rewarding businesses that produced actual cash rather than PowerPoint promises.
For years, cheap money allowed almost any story to find an audience. Higher rates changed that. They starved many young companies of the capital they needed to survive. But for scaled, positive cash-generating businesses still growing quickly, the same environment created an opportunity to widen their moats.
That mattered to us.
Purple Group began the year coming off the strongest result in its history. The question was whether we could compound from it.
We did.
At the half-year, Group revenue was up 8.8%, costs were up just 0.5% and profit before tax increased by 33%. Inside that, the Easy Group was the real story. Revenue increased by 18.5%, costs increased by 1.6% and profit before tax grew by 66%. Revenue grew more than eleven times faster than costs. That is the operating leverage we spent a decade promising would arrive. It has arrived.
Active clients reached 1.245 million. Client assets reached almost R95 billion. Retail inflows grew by 51% to more than R8 billion in six months. Then, on 4 May, we crossed R100 billion in client assets. A decade earlier we had R1 billion. The number mattered. But what sat underneath it mattered more. Millions of deposits. Millions of investment decisions. People choosing to own something. People choosing to give their future selves a better chance.
Trust, patience and courage, repeated over time. Our clients compounded. And so did we.
By year-end, client assets had moved beyond R105 billion. The base is now big enough that the compounding itself begins to do some of the heavy lifting. But only some. The rest still belongs to us. Our financial year ended on 31 August. The final scorecard is still being completed, and our results should be out around 11 November. Then you can all judge it for yourselves. 😊
We broke deposit records throughout the year. Then March broke them all again. Total monthly deposits exceeded R2.5 billion and retail deposits came close to R2 billion. EasyETFs passed R2 billion in assets under management in under eighteen months.
EasyRetire continued to show us just how large the retirement opportunity is. Clients transferring retirement assets onto our platform arrived with balances many times larger than the average retail investor.
Our Capitec partnership passed 228,000 funded accounts and R1 billion invested, with penetration still below 3%.
In August, we announced our partnership with Absa, which will give more than 12 million Absa clients direct access to invest through the Absa app. Around 125,000 EasyEquities clients are already connected to Absa in some way. The partnership recognises that natural overlap and makes the journey between banking and investing far easier. Capitec proved the power of meeting clients where they already are. Absa gives us another opportunity to do it at enormous scale.
In the Philippines, we moved from a presentation, a partner and a promise to real people investing through a regulated production environment. The first GCash users entered the sandbox. Tiny in the numbers today. Potentially enormous in the future.
ZARU opened another door, placing us at the meeting point between traditional investment infrastructure and a digital rand that can move at internet speed.
EasyEquities turns 12 in October. Twelve years ago we were trying to persuade people that fractional ownership mattered and that ordinary South Africans deserved access to the same investments as everyone else. Today the argument has largely been won.
Access is no longer the destination. It is the starting line.
AI filled more of my head than almost anything else this year. Not because it is fashionable. Because it changes the architecture of a business.
We have seen productivity improvements of between three and twenty times in teams that have adopted it properly, not by replacing the people in those teams but by expanding what the best of them can do. That distinction matters.
The AI era initially advantages experience. But it often hands the willingness to lean in to the young.
The Telescope transaction emerged from that belief. For two weeks, Luc and Althea sat inside our business. They met our teams, partners, shareholders and anyone else willing to listen. They came from the outside carrying none of our history and none of our excuses. That made their perspective valuable.
The view from the outside in is often more honest than the mirror.
It confirmed what I already suspected. We have extraordinary talent, enormous opportunity and the trust of our clients and partners. And for all that we’ve achieved, there is still so much more potential for us to unlock.
Our responsibility now is to turn that potential into progress.
Faster engineering. Better service. More personal investment journeys. A platform that builds on what has always made Easy distinctive - while becoming even better at delivering on it.
AI is not just changing how we work. It is rearchitecting who we are.
This was a year of scale. More clients. More assets. More deposits. More products. More partners. More profit. But those are company records. The personal scorecard is different.
I got stronger. I trained more consistently. I swam further and faster. I pushed weights I had no business pushing at 53, and learned again that a balanced mind is far easier to find inside a strong body.
I travelled. Cambodia. Vietnam. Mozambique. New streets, different food, unfamiliar languages and the reminder that the world is impossibly large when you stay still and beautifully small when you move through it with the people you love.
I watched my children continue becoming themselves. That is one of the more confusing privileges of getting older. Your instinct is still to protect them, while your responsibility is increasingly to let them go. I watched people in our business step forward. There is satisfaction in putting runs on the board for your team. There may be even more satisfaction in watching your team raise its contribution above yours.
The best teams in the world are built the same way. They are shaped by their strongest players, but the strongest player is rarely the one scoring the most points. Siya Kolisi and the Springboks prove it every time they play. The team is not carried by one great player. It is lifted by players who make everyone around them better.
I see the same thing at home. Sarah, Tristan, Kirra and Mika rarely need to be the ones scoring the points. What they do, again and again, is make the rest of us better players.
That is not a threat to leadership. It is the point of it.
We did not move fast enough everywhere. Parts of our platform still sit between the architecture of our past and the experience our clients deserve. Service was not consistently at the standard we expect of ourselves. Five stars, every client, every time sounds simple until you try to deliver it across more than a million active clients.
But difficulty is not an excuse.
We also got things wrong. EasyTrader produced extraordinary underlying growth, but a failure in our hedging model resulted in a R21.3 million loss. The circumstances were unusual. The accountability was not. The model was wrong. It was fixed. The risk was removed. You do not get to celebrate the records and outsource the failures. They belong on the same scorecard.
Personally, I did not always create enough space. There were weeks when the urgent crowded out the important, when work travelled home with me even if only inside my head, when being present physically was not the same as being present.
I know better. Which means I have fewer excuses.
This year also reminded us how quickly life can divide itself into before and after. We experienced loss. Some expected. Some impossible to understand. I learned that grief does not arrive alone. It brings questions, anger, guilt, helplessness and a desperate instinct to find meaning where there may be none. It also exposes love. The real kind. The kind that protects rather than controls. The kind that makes the people around us feel safe. The kind that asks nothing more than proximity when there are no words capable of doing the work.
There were moments this year when business felt very important. There were others when it meant almost nothing.
Both are true.
The year reinforced a few truths.
Happiness comes from your proximity to the people you love when you wake up. It comes from family who have become best friends, and friends I now count as family. It comes from a balanced mind and a strong body. It comes from putting runs on the board for your team, but also from watching your team raise its contribution above your own. It comes from the security of a sound and growing nest egg, but also from the prospect of new horizons coming into view. It comes from travelling to new places, but also from returning to the familiar shores that fill my veins and reconnect me to my source.
It comes from ambition. But not ambition without an end.
The point is not to accumulate more for the sake of having more. It is to create the freedom to choose where you wake up, what you work on and who you spend your time with.
That is wealth.
So how did 53 do?
The business grew. The team grew. Our clients grew their wealth. Our family travelled, celebrated, worried, recovered and held one another closer. I got stronger. I wrote more. I listened more. Not always enough, but more.
There were records. There were failures. There was laughter. There was loss. There were moments I would happily live again and others I wish had never happened. That is not a clean scorecard. But it is an honest one. And it reads well enough.
My mom would have been 81. I am 53. The distance between those two numbers no longer feels as wide as it once did. I don't find that depressing. I find it clarifying.
There is still a lot I want to build. The Telescope acquisition. An EasyEquities platform worthy of the people who trust it. The Philippines at scale. New products, better products and a financial system that gives millions more people the dignity of ownership.
There are places I still want to see. Mountains still to climb. More time I want to spend with Sarah. More life I want to share with Tristan, Kirra and Mika. More mornings waking up close to the people I love. The scorecard for 53 reads well enough. But frankly, it is the low-water mark for 54.
Time is not running out. It is running. Best we get on with it.
The world is not waiting. What you do next is the only thing that matters.
Stay Savage,
Charles
Any opinions, news, research, reports, analyses, prices, or other information contained within this research is provided by an external contributor as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice for the purposes of the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act, 2002. First World Trader (Pty) Ltd t/a EasyEquities (“EasyEquities”) does not warrant the correctness, accuracy, timeliness, reliability or completeness of any information (i) contained within this research and (ii) received from third party data providers. You must rely solely upon your own judgment in all aspects of your investment and/or trading decisions and all investments and/or trades are made at your own risk. EasyEquities (including any of their employees) will not accept any liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage, including without limitation, any loss of profit, which may arise directly or indirectly from use of or reliance on the market commentary. The content contained within is subject to change at any time without notice