My business partner, Raph, was working in the world food program for the UN and he said, "Hey, why not start a remittance business in South Africa?" Both of us had no experience in financial services whatsoever and never really thought about remittances or really looked into it. But we started to understand that and realize that there was a massive problem because South Africa is home to millions of migrants and nowhere in the world did they pay as much to send small amounts of money home to their family. So, big problem.

So I believe that those inflexion points, where you do get knocked down or someone doesn't believe in what you do, use that as even more motivation to carry on and actually achieve what you want to achieve.

As soon as I finished school, turned 18, I bought a ticket to the UK and I was going to go and work and make myself. I was always fiercely independent. In the UK, I did a few menial jobs - I worked in hotels and factories and those kinds of things. So I didn't come in from formal education. I came in just purely by experience, by doing and really riding the characteristics and traits of my personality that work really well with people.

We set up our company with the understanding that, I and my business partner, we're not developers, we're not technologists. We don't know anything about finance. But we do know that there's a problem that needs to be solved and it's really just about being as pragmatic as possible about, how do you solve this? What skills do you need? In the beginning, it really is not about trying to do everything yourself. 

The problem we're solving is we're helping people who are working in a foreign country to send money home to their families, and they find it really difficult to send money home. Prior to us launching our money transfer service, there wasn't a lot of competition in terms of what we do in South Africa. And it was very antiquated and there was no use of technology.

So, by and large, money transferred traditionally out of South Africa across borders is done informally. I'll give you an example. The Mozambican wants to get money to Mozambique. He or she will go to a local bus or taxi driver in the Eastern Cape who is from Mozambique and give them the physical cash. That bus driver will charge them 20% for that, then that bus needs to leave and it needs to get to Mozambique. That could be five days or two weeks, then once they get through the border, the recipient of that money needs to then travel from wherever they are, it could be a rural setting, into Maputo or to a big town nearby. That costs money, and eventually, hopefully the money finds its way to where it needs to go. Now, if you have a situation where that money is needed to buy medicine, then that's a terrible situation to be in.

When we started, the intention was to create a company that had a very different culture to what is normal out there. I think it speaks to my character, as well as Rafael's character, definitely not to do things the way that things have always been done. Challenge everything, think about why things are done a certain way and then do it the opposite way. So for us, we wanted a socially conscious business that is helping to solve a problem. And you can get people to come in and join you on that journey, and they also believe in what you're doing. Then it just becomes natural.

Number one is that we don't have any financial targets in the company. So, financially we've been successful, but we have no targets. Why? Because we want to be driven by making our customer experience better, acquiring customers better, having less churn. If you focus on that and you put the customer at the center of it, the financial stuff will sort itself out. But as soon as you put that at number one, some other things will suffer and you will lose a lot of the soul and the essence of what you're starting and what you're trying to create.

We have an interesting system of having three CEOs. It's not very common in the business world and I think that you've got to find what works for you. We found that this model works very well for us. So we have two founders, myself and Raphael. We founded the business and as the business grew and got bigger, we realized that we obviously had to bring in more expertise into the team.

What is important when you're starting out as an entrepreneur, is that you focus. This is the number one thing. Because you can start looking at a problem and you can then see all of these shiny balls, like all the different add-ons that you can do and it's very easy to go down and get lost. There are so many opportunities and you've got to be really disciplined and strict to say, "Okay, this is the one problem that I'm going to crack. I'm going to focus all my energy on this one thing and when I crack that, I'm going to look at the next shiny ball. But only then".