Simple is hard.

We just launched a WealthTech product for Standard Chartered Bank in Uganda.

If you haven’t seen our shoutouts, you can watch the video here:

Watch the SC Shilingi Funds Video

It’s called the SC Uganda Shillingi Fund. It gives people in Uganda the opportunity to start saving for their goals from as low as US$5 for their first investment. It only has one fund to choose from – A Sanlam Money Market Fund. You either invest or don’t. It’s simple to use, easy to onboard, and available to everyone.

I feel this is WealthTech at its best. Making investing accessible means making it simple.

In all the rush to build new innovative tech products, we sometimes forget that what we should be doing is building products that customers want to use.

Here are two maxims from Steve Jobs that guided Apple:

1) Simple is hard

We made the SC Shillingi Fund as simple and intuitive as possible.

It had:

• No fancy extra features;
• No supermarket of funds to choose from;
• No complex jargon.
• Just a simple offering.

“You can save with us” from as low as US$5 and there is one product to invest in.

Sanlam, the biggest asset manager in Africa provided the money market fund, and Standard Chartered, a world-leading bank, provided the platform. When you get a simple product from trusted businesses, people will use it.

Building this was very hard, but the result was simple.

2) People don’t know what they want till we build it.

While it may seem obvious that people should save using a digital-first wealth product, it isn’t always available for them. Also, being able to invest from as low as US$5 is not something people immediately think to ask for. Wealth has traditionally been for people who already had money before they get ‘financial advice’, but that’s illogical. Surely, it’s the people who haven’t been able to start saving who need the best products. So there wasn’t an overwhelming demand for this new type of digital wealth. But once people saw it and used it, they knew they needed it.

We are super proud of what we built for SCB Uganda. It’s a game changer for them and their customers.

For your digital wealth strategy, think about Steve’s two rules.

Is it simple?

Did you give them something they didn’t know they needed?

Do both of those, and you will have a winner.

Best,
Ned Phillips
Founder & CEO