Futuregrowth makes venture capital investment in LifeCheq
Futuregrowth Asset Management, through its Futuregrowth Development Equity Fund (DEF), has invested in LifeCheq, a digitised holistic personal finance business that aims to make expert advice accessible to professionals and entrepreneurs who are currently not served well by the existing financial advice industry.
The South African asset manager has been making selective VC investments into businesses that it believes offer distinctive business propositions and strong growth opportunities.
Amrish Narrandes, head of unlisted equity transactions at Futuregrowth says, “What we most liked about LifeCheq is that it has taken something like personal finance, which can be complex and as a result easily avoided, and uses technology to offer a financial service in an attractive way to a far broader market.”
Narrandes says LifeCheq more than met Futuregrowth’s investment requirements. It is a disruptor in the financial services industry, with a well-defined, addressable market, providing wealth management technology-based services to mass-affluent and emerging-affluent individuals. “We also took comfort from the fact that the business had already built up traction and had proved its credentials and, as a result, we bought into the business vision and proposition.”
“Most importantly,” says Kearon Gordon, investment analyst at Futuregrowth, “the business has an impressive management team, with all the credentials and experience to qualify as an A-team. The four co-founders and members of the executive management team have a diverse range of experience from financial services product design to software engineering.”
Futuregrowth’s investment in LifeCheq supplements DEF’s other early-stage investment. In late 2018, the asset manager made another VC investment in Yoco, the innovative technology-driven point-of-sale payments provider. DEF was the first South African institutional investor in the company, and, to date, the investment has proved to be a success.
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