How Purple Group CEO Charles Savage disrupted an entire industry by offering easy, online investing

Charles Savage, CEO of the Purple Group and its EasyEquities platform, is known as a business figure who helped to revolutionise investing in South Africa.

That wasn't always the plan - as Savage is quoted on the EasyEquities blog, "I wanted to be an accountant who surfed around the world."

The changemaker grew up enjoying the ocean in Cape Town, although he attended high school in Johannesburg, at St Stithians College.

And after graduating with a Bachelor of Commerce degree in accounting and information systems from the University of Cape Town (UCT), Savage did travel the world surfing.

At the time, in the 90s, the Internet was still a relative unknown.

"Online commerce was just starting and on my travels two industries caught my attention - the travel industry itself, as it was just so much more convenient to use the Internet to make bookings, and the other was connected to an interest I had at university which was investing in shares."

While there were no share investment platforms back then, he started to think about what it might be like if students like himself could access the Internet to make investments.

"Back then I was really naive because the ecosystem was just so poor - everything was slow, it was expensive, you didn't have mobile phones in your hand, but it sowed the seeds for what eventually happened decades later with EasyEquities."

On his return to South Africa, Savage's first real job was as an internal accountant at the Health & Racquet Club which became Virgin Active, where he says he was "dispassionate" about what he was doing.

Seeing how much fun a university friend was having building websites at the start of the ecommerce dotcom era, he jumped ship to join him.

"I'd never sold a website, I'd hardly used the Internet, but could write a little bit of code thanks to my studies. We built almost all of the first top ecommerce sites in SA... The benefit was that we managed to look inside all of these disparate companies and their business models, and then bring them online."

This experience was like an MBA, giving him back in '98 or '99 an accelerated view into what the future of commerce might look like.

"In a way we were right at the beginning of the revolution, getting in at the start of a big change. Everyone was against the Internet and it feels no different to what AI feels like today - there were 5% of the people passionate about what the Internet was going to do, another 15 -20% who could believe the future but weren't leaning into it, and then the vast majority who just said it was a phase."

As he recalls, the 5% were right but just early, the 15% were right to be skeptical and probably counted themselves as early adopters and the 80% were wrong.

Savage's advice now to young people looking for a career, is to find a stream that's moving fast.

Even the slowest boat in a fast-moving stream moves faster than a fast boat in a slow-moving stream, he remarks.

"That is what, to me, the Internet presented. We had the opportunity to be a boat in a very fast-moving stream and there weren't that many boats with us, so it was the right place to be, the right time, a bit of luck and a bit of foresight."

Savage explains how the trajectory that led him to EasyEquities, started at that point.

"In 2000, one of my biggest clients was GT247.com which is still in the Purple Group today. The founders - one South African and four international, believed that the Internet was going to change trading, specifically derivatives trading or what we call CFDs today... I became chief technology officer of the group and focused on one ecommerce online business."

"At the time it looked like it was a market opportunity for everyone, but we quickly worked out that not everyone had access and that fundamentally trading was a sophisticated game, so we really focused on sophisticated places, sophisticated people, and building platforms for those who had a high level of confidence and skills."

From 2000 to 2007 they built the business, raising $2 million to found it. In 2007 they sold it to the Purple Group, then Purple Capital, for a whopping €36 million.

By then they had customers all around the globe, trading across 44 exchanges with offices on every continent. However, that €36 million business served a niche market of less than 20,000 very sophisticated customers.

This did not speak to his desire to get students or young people investing, says Savage.

"We served a need in a very small group of individuals who, quite frankly, didn't need us. It wasn't changing people's lives in a positive way; I didn't have a big runway for a positive influence on society and I kind of lost interest."

It was a conversation with family and friends on a Mozambique beach that proved to crystallise what was missing for Savage to move towards his goal.

He asked the group why they weren't investing and they all had the same answer, said in different ways:

"The answer led to EasyEquities because what they said is that they'd tried but were intimidated - the concepts wre unfamiliar to them, the language we used felt like a closed private group... I asked 'what if we make it easy?' and they said then they would all buy shares."

It's the players in the ecosystem that allowed EasyEquities their moment to break out of this exclusionary environment, Savage says.

"When people were sitting on PCs it wasn't easy like it is now with the proliferation of bank accounts, with high-speed internet, access on devices wherever you may be... The ecosystem players have done their job so that we can reach our customers wherever they might be so they can invest in the shares they want, when they want."

Savage also reveals just how good their investors have become at managing their own portfolios as they educate themselves over time - take a listen in the interview audio at the top of the article.