10X Investments has appointed members of the team that created SnapScan to senior roles in the business.
Technology development company Sproutly, whose staff includes key members of the team that developed SnapScan, the South African mobile payment provider, will be joining 10X in January 2023.
Tobie Van Heerden, CEO of 10X Investments, says this development truly puts tech at the centre of the business. He added that, for 10X, technology is “not an added, bolt-on service” but a “core competency”, which is why the asset management firm is putting the “best South African developers” at the centre of the business.
Van Heerden and a largely new executive team have led a rapid transformation of 10X from its origins as a boutique retirement specialist into a full-service asset management company. This obvious next step for the fast-growing asset manager shows that 10X is a tech-lead company rather than a tech-enabled one.
Sproutly’s co-founders will be joining the business in senior roles: Estiaan le Roux joins as chief technology officer and Rupert Sully comes in as lead: direct to consumer business. They will bring a team of five software developers with them.
After establishing SnapScan, Le Roux and Sully founded Sproutly and focussed on real-time machine learning and data engineering problems for global agro-industrial companies. As the team looked to build fintech products again, says Sully, “the investment space really struck us as presenting massive opportunities to differentiate with good technology products”.
Le Roux adds that joining 10X during this period of transformation and renewal “gives our team a unique opportunity to apply our skills and lessons learned in product development methodologies to a sector that we are all very passionate about”.