Rinse Jacobs is the co-founder/CEO of Zazu, a modern banking experience built for entrepreneurs and scaling businesses shaping the future of the continent.
Zazu is founded with the idea of making banking better for African founders and SMEs by providing them with a powerful bank account at the core, combined with invoicing, bookkeeping and cash flow management tools – making banking feel less like an obstacle and more like a catalyst for growth.
Rinse Jacobs shared with Today Africa about his entrepreneurial journey.
Can you tell me what you have spent the last eight years of your life doing?
I’ve been in the European fintech scene for a decade mostly out of Germany. I was lucky enough to join a company called Solaris Bank in the very early days. What we were doing was making sure that FinTechs, but also various other companies, had access to wide-label financial services. So banking as a service in the European market.
It was my job to set up the commercial organization and to really drive that from 20 people all the way up to 800 plus, and thereby also becoming a unicorn in that journey. And that was really dealing with questions like, how as a FinTech can you get up and running in the European space.
We as Solaris were providing the backbone with the regulatory as well as on the technology side, a lot of the heavy lifting. And over time, we saw that it wasn’t too much only the fintechs that were interested in this, but we actually saw that there were a lot of big companies that said, I want to actually expand my ecosystem in offering financial services.
Look at Zazu, look at various mobility providers who all sell the cards and the likes are very interesting for me. So that’s what I’ve been doing. And that’s also where, of course, I saw a lot of the fintechs models that worked well and that didn’t work well.
And together with our colleagues, as I do with them, said, look, why not take that knowledge that we have gathered over those last years and actually apply that into a market where we see a lot of opportunities happening in the fintech space and that’s how Zazu basically was born.
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What knowledge have you gathered that is helping you build Zazu?
I would say first and foremost what has helped a lot is as a young company or as a founder, you have a lot of roller coaster days. So you have days that are very high, and days that are very low. But especially on the low days, it’s important to remember that the good days are coming as well.
As long as you have a bad day, you know a good day is coming. So that always keeps you up and running. I think that’s very important. Plus, when it comes to hiring, for example, or building out your team.
I think the overarching question that we have been always asking ourselves is to say, would I want to have more, would I want to have 10 more profiles or 10 more persons just like that person before you hire them?
And that kind of gives you an indication like, hey, is this the kind of cultural fit that we’re looking for in the company? And definitely make sure that you get people around you that are not just saying yes all the time, but are actually challenging the interaction or actually challenging what you have to say.
But these are very important aspects and I would also say time blocking. Make sure that you don’t just get managed by your calendar, but actually manage your own calendar. So the other way around.
So that you have enough time to reflect, enough time to actually do the work that you want to do during the day and not only get stuck in meetings. Because we all know those days where you’re back to back in Zoom meetings and it’s just completely destructive for your creativity.
You said, don’t allow your calendar to manage you but the one to manage your calendar. Can you speak more on that?
It’s easy to just say, I’m shooting in another meeting or we quickly chat for 10 minutes, which quickly turns into 30 minutes. So make sure that you have enough respect for your own time and for your colleagues’ time.
To make sure if it’s really only 10 minutes, stick to the 10 minute mark. Make sure your schedule your day or your week out in advance to understand, okay, where do I want to do what kind of work?
And actually be disciplined enough to then also say, well, if I’m hitting that time block to actually start cracking all my emails, I’m actually gonna do my emails instead of doing something else or having another quick chat with a colleague because I might as well catch up with that colleague.
But to really be disciplined with your time and be aware that you, to some degree, should have a life outside of your calendar as well. And actually want to do some creative thinking or hobbies or sports that are I think very important for becoming successful.
How did you and your co-founder, German meet and what convinced you that he’s the right guy to be your co-founder?
We knew each other already from the Solaris time, from the European fintech space. So we actually, back in the day when he was not yet working at Solaris, we were sometimes battling for the same deals in the market.
So we knew each other as competitive forces in the very beginning. And then at some point, I was able to bring him on to Solaris Bank, where we worked together for a long time in the commercial organization where he really built out all the strategic partners and channel partners for Solaris.
There I saw the expertise that he brings in around networking, around go-to-market strategies building and really building out the network. That was very important for us to get right. Plus the mindset that he shares together with me is just no plan B, we just go full force in and there’s no way back and that keeps you motivated for each other.
There’s always something to say for, yeah, but an ideal founder team should not be two commercial people. And I understand that because you, to some degree, want to split responsibilities. But I have taken on much more the role of, as the CEO, less commercial, but more looking at finances, operations, legal, team building, and to some degree, product.
So that’s where we clearly separate the responsibilities for ourselves and of course we have a couple other very, very talented people around us as well that make sure to pick up all the other skills that we have among the two of us, like technology, to some degree project management or local regulatory knowledge.
These are things that we have, of course, covered for by hiring and working with the right people locally.
Let’s talk about Zazu. Why did you choose Africa and why choose South Africa to be your base?
A lot of people said, why would you give up a good paying job to do something completely crazy in the continent that you’re not as familiar with? I get that point, but it is purely looking at and coming from the drive of wanting to have impact, wanting to build cool products.
And the European fintech scene is quite consolidated. It’s quite mature. So the new vintage that is coming in are just an iterative improvement of what has been out there. Whereas what you see in Africa, there’s a ton of opportunities out there still, where a lot of the business models that you see in Europe or the US or in Asia can be applied with the right global twists to the market.
And when we sat together, I said, where can we have the most impact? For us, it was very clear by looking at the data, by looking at the entrepreneurs that SME banking is simply broken in Africa. Obviously, everybody knows the backbone of the African economy are the small SMEs.
But yet, all of the big banks that are out there in Africa don’t really care for the SMEs, for the freelancers, or for the sole proprietors. So there is a big gap in what support they are getting, those local founders, versus what they’re getting in the European or the US space. And that is exactly why we said, well, let’s look more detailed into Africa.
And then also we applied a decision framework on the different jurisdictions, where obviously with FinTech, you are looking at regulatory spaces. So the regulator is a very important aspect. And what we found in South Africa is that it’s a very robust regulator, but yet very friendly and willing to look and push innovation into the market. That sets us up for success.
Then the second aspect for us was very important was the number of SMEs that are being created in the country every year. And in South Africa, there are more than 400,000 SMEs created every year. If you were to combine Germany, France and Nigeria together, that’s roughly the same amount of SMEs created in one country. That shows that there’s a lot of entrepreneurial spirit in the country.
And thirdly, because we’re talking about a digital product, the digital neo-bank, it is most important to go and pilot in a market where the population or at least the SMEs population is much more service oriented and a bit more tech savvy and ready to take on these digital products and to test them out.
That is why we went ahead with South Africa as a hypothesis and then we said to each other you know what first before we do anything else we’re just going to stay in South Africa for a while.
Talk with hundreds of different people from literally knocking on the doors of different mom and pop stores to entrepreneurs, co-working spaces, and just ask a bunch of different questions around what their situation looks like with banking, what they’re missing, what they’re seeing.
And a lot of the answers that came back were like, look, my bank, it kind of works. If I send money, I know it’s going to arrive. If I go to the branch, at some point, I will speak to somebody.
But they’re lacking the real next level of banking, which is making everything work, first of all, stably and smoothly in a way that it’s almost fun to interact with it, that you can actually get useful insights out of it..
So with that first information, we went back and started to sketch out our first ideas on what that should look like, what shapes should take place. And very quickly for us, we said, well, it’s obvious that wherever you start as a business, you would always start with a business bank account.
That’s where effectively, you need your money in, you need your money out with a card or some kind of payment options. And that has grown out now to a slightly larger platform ecosystem where you as an entrepreneur can really manage your financial flows and actually get an insight on your financial health of your business. So that’s where the drive really came from.
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Why did you name your startup Zazu?
We looked at a couple different options of course but for us it had to be a name that’s very catchy. That was a very important part. Of course also Zazu means movement and money needs to flow to thrive and to make sure that you understand what’s happening.
But it’s of course also with a wink towards, as everybody would know, the bird in Lion King. The only reasonable character. And that’s where the personal advice aspect comes into play as well. Zazu being the bird, the advisor to the king in the movie. So that’s where it really comes from.
And when we started to test things, we really saw that it’s really catchy. And the more we started using it, we were actually very happy with the name and stock, so then we just doubled down.
Was there any experience that you had in your previous workplace that inspired you to choose South Africa?
From a personal perspective, not at all. So in all honesty, I had not been in South Africa before. The first time I came here was purely to look for a business opportunity. And that goes to show that if you just look at Africa from the large media, you always think, oh, there’s a lot of things happening there but we haven’t yet seen that really happen.
But when you’re actually in the country itself, you see a lot of really cool startups and really excited people that are super driven to get something going. That really changed my mind that it is not the way it’s being portrayed in the big media. It is much further advanced than you actually would think.
And that really excited us for the market itself. By now, the community that we have gathered around ourselves, for example, around Innovation City, a co-working space that we are, where we’re located in Cape Town. There’s a ton of really cool entrepreneurs that are supporting us, that are sharing introductions, sharing insights, doing testing with us.
So it’s been an amazing welcome to be there in the market. But from a personal trigger, there was none. It was purely looking at the opportunity and the willingness to drive to create impact somewhere that we had seen in Europe before but were missing in our daily lives in Europe. So that’s where really the drive came from.
What experience have you gathered within the short while that you have stayed in South Africa?
Cape Town is slightly different from various other cities in South Africa. We totally understand that. But what I have found is very warm people that want to see you succeed. They are still to some degree wondering what to do with my big bank versus what I do with the new one after they’re coming out and how much I can trust all of this.
So there’s a bit of an educational process that probably still needs to happen. But as mentioned, there’s a ton of talent that we’re seeing. We’re making really a lot of use of a lot of local insights and a lot of local support that we are getting. And people are very excited generally to see companies succeed.
We’ve been very happy with how we’ve been received, as I’ve mentioned. Being here in Cape Town, obviously a very different environment than what you see in Europe, very different flow of the city and of the country, but a lot of promise.
And what we saw with the change of the government right after the elections, we saw a total shift in people’s mindset, if you will, almost to really be more optimistic and ready to take on new challenges. And that really also propelled us to really go that extra level to see there is a real potential to succeed in the market.
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Can you tell us more about Zazu and the new thing you are bringing to the market?
We looked at the different banks and how they are dealing with customer support, with their products, with the onboarding experience of creating an account. And I must tell you, there’s nothing that’s very exciting. So that was quite a painful experience.
We said to them, look, there are so many easy ways to do this so much better. And we kind of wondered to ourselves, why are these big banks not just improving the small details on their websites or on their onboarding processes?
What we are really bringing to market is a bank account at the core, with the account and the card and the payments, but around that making sure that people can really understand what my financial health looks like for my business?
What next step do I need to take to really make sure I can thrive as a business? But I’ve had many interactions with, whether it’s taxi drivers, e-commerce store builders, coffee shop owners, all who said, well, I would have loved to have had a mentor in the past to really make sure I can understand what benefits can exist by running your own company.
There’s various tax benefits that you can optimize for. There are accounting principles that you have to look at. But a lot of these people are left to their own devices. So we are really offering a guiding hand to make sure we help you to digitally incorporate a company, giving you a proper bank account that is fully digital so you can manage this on the go.
Because many people are busy with their daily lives. They don’t have time to sit on the laptop for three hours and figure out what the banking situation looks like. They want to get that on the go in their app and from the get-go understand, hey, these are the next steps.
Whether that means setting aside a certain amount of money for your taxes because your tax reports are due, whether it is paying certain invoices or managing certain expenses to understand how can I optimize for my expenses or how can I further increase my revenue.
All of these things, the bank should be able to answer because they have all that raw data. But banks are not used to dealing and managing data in such a way that is visualized and made friendly enough for customers to understand. Because most SME owners globally don’t have a PhD in finance.
They don’t always understand the intricacies that exist that you need to deal with with an accountant. So why not make that easier for them and give them the tools to actually interact with the data, understand that data and give them those next steps?
That is why we said to ourselves, next to that account and the card, we’re really building out a platform around that where we connect with different players, lenders, payroll providers, e-commerce checkout tools, just again to make sure that all of these critical financial flows that you have in business have come together.
Then of course, the magic of AI that had to be dropped somewhere, we make sure that we get a few contextualized and personalized advice on what to do next. And that is where things become much easier than for the business. So that is really what we bring to market and something that we haven’t seen in space before.
How secure is your platform so that someone’s data doesn’t get tampered with?
Obviously, this has been critical for us. And that’s luckily, again, our CTO has quite a lot of experience in building out banking systems and other applications in the financial industry. What we look at is how do you make sure security is woven into the very fabric of the product.
So not just as an additional layer on top, but really make sure that from all angles we’re looking at how you can best secure the product. And sometimes that might mean the customer might need to take an extra step for verifying themselves or for releasing a transaction.
But I think if you explain it well enough to a customer that this is to reduce fraud, to make sure the money remains safe, they’re willing to take that extra step, to take that extra second to just ensure that safety.
And this is where starting from scratch, you can obviously make use. Starting technically from scratch, you’re able to make use of the latest technologies, whereas the older banks, the traditional banks are using legacy technology that is 30, 40, 50 plus years old.
Obviously there’s a lot of loopholes, there’s a lot of vulnerabilities that I have found in those tools. That’s why they have difficult times to maneuver a lot because they’re stuck with that old system. And that will take a lot of money to really move that over to other systems.
That’s the advantage that we bring to the market. So it’s the expertise and it is the latest technology that is being used in a smart way.
What are the challenges you have faced in the short space that you have started your business?
I would say the difficulties that we have faced. Well, the most obvious one being, of course, especially in the very beginning of our build phase and when we were getting ourselves known in the market, there were a lot of people that were very skeptical of us like, what do these European guys know about setting up a business in Africa? Who do they think they are?
Obviously, fair enough, they should be skeptical. But if you look at the data, over 50% of the fintech unicorns are foreign founders. Are people that look at the market with a completely fresh set of eyes. They are not limited by having been exposed to the system for very long, so they can see gaps and they can see those difficulties much more easily than a typical local founder can.
So that was a big point, but how do we make sure we come across and we are positioned in a way that people actually believe in us and believe in the story. That the only way you can do that is by just being out there and have a lot of conversations, talk with a lot of people and show that grit, show that you’re actually making progress towards the different goals that you’re setting for yourself.
Be vulnerable, be challenged, be asked hundreds of questions, go for different interviews and different coffees and events and everything else, just to make sure that people start to see, hey, these guys are for real. They’re living here now. They’re going for it and they’re getting first funding.
And there’s actually a product that’s being tested. So actually, these guys are building something. That’s where, again, discipline and tenacity come in to just show them and prove them wrong effectively. So that was the big one.
But that still of course doesn’t make up for the fact that we don’t have local South African banking knowledge. And that’s something that we’re very honest with ourselves as well. We know building businesses and we know building FinTech businesses.
But what we don’t know is how do South African banking and the regulations operate here? And how do you deal with the regulator locally? Because every regulator is slightly different, of course.
And that is where we very quickly took on a couple of advisors and a couple of very experienced senior bankers to help us navigate these waters as well, which again brought in more trust from the banks and from the regulators perspective that we know what we’re doing.
Because we surround ourselves with knowledgeable and reputable people in the market. So that helped a lot. And by now more and more people have actually started to believe in us. That’s also what caused the waiting list to grow, of course.
Even though we of course don’t know perhaps all the intricacies or didn’t know all the intricacies of the local banking scene, at the very front where the customer sits with the product and the apps, the entrepreneurial challenges that exist in Asia, in Europe, in Africa, are largely the same.
It is about how do you get your first customers? How do you optimize your finances? How do you hire the best teams? These are all the same difficulties that entrepreneurs are facing. And so it doesn’t matter if you build out a new bank in Europe or in Asia or Africa because largely you will serve similar products to solve the same problems that they’re facing.
It is just about how do you apply that locally and how do you set up operations in such a way that the local regulators are happy with that as well. That’s indeed where the local expertise needs to come in.
What were the things that you heard when you were in Europe that when you came to Africa or South Africa were not actually true?
They will say in Africa, you don’t have the infrastructure. In Africa, half of the people are perhaps farmers. Obviously, this is not true. But this is obviously what a lot of people have in their mind when they talk about the continent is underdeveloped and there’s not enough people that are really pushing for real change.
That’s obviously something that cannot be true. Obviously, you see a lot of really good companies out there in Africa. Unfortunately, also see that a lot of the investors don’t just fully believe in Africa. And that causes this spiraling cycle of there not enough funding coming in.
Entrepreneurs cannot take as much risk or take as many bold decisions. So they need to be a bit more closer to the ground. And by that, build healthier businesses because they need to go for profitability much quicker than what you would see in the US. But that also leads them to grow much less quickly and therefore also be much less innovative than what you would see in the US.
But what I have seen here is that you have a lot of people that are very well educated, that are very smart and really, their drive is very different. Their drive is not just saying, oh, I just want to create something fancy, something cool. No, they actually want to build something that can uplift the country, that can really grow them and their community into something greater than that they currently are.
And that is not really something that you see as much in European space. The European space is more. I do it for myself and for my own status. Whereas I think in Africa that’s much more about how I can support the larger environment or community around me. Yeah, I think that that would sum it up.
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You are building your startup here in Africa so how were you able to raise funds?
I would subscribe to the idea that raising funds in Europe for European business would have been a slightly easier way to go about things. But we like to do sometimes things that are a bit more difficult. So that’s where we’re at.
In the very beginning, when we had the idea and we wanted to start building, fully bootstrap. So fully using our own money, because we were so convinced of what we’re building and the need for this in the market. Then at some point, we realized, well, we obviously don’t have unlimited bank accounts ourselves either.
So let’s bring some knowledgeable people. And that is where we were able to find a mix of angels and advisors that partially come from the European space, founders, board members, from companies that we have worked with or from our own network that believe in us.
Also African founders that understand the pains that those SMEs are having or that they have had themselves around banking and they fully subscribe to the vision that we are having around building powerful banking for ambitious people.
That is why we were able to collect a very nice amount of angel funds. With that building out the first proposition in the market. What you often see is that in Africa people are a bit more cautious with investing or at least international investors investing into Africa. They’re a bit more cautious.
You just need to get over the first hurdle to show that the first product market fits with your first 500 to 1000 customers that are paying and actually starting to grow and use the business on a daily basis. And once you have that, then more and more people and also local investors, local VCs, family offices will show up and support the idea.
That is what we’re building towards right now. Getting the product live in with as much stretching every penny that we can in a true entrepreneurial fashion. And still, of course, always raising, always fundraising on our side.
But we believe that as soon as we go live and we have first customers on the platform, things will become much easier. Do we believe in those guys and do we believe in the vision? But what are the numbers saying? To know if the numbers are actually backing up with the vision portrayed to be.
What are the key lessons that you have learned in your journey building your business in Africa?
What I have learned from building the business here in Africa. I think it comes close to what we talked about a bit earlier around what I had learned in Solaris. But it’s a bit different to be in a company like Solaris where there were some basic things set up already, versus really starting it yourself from scratch and being responsible for everything.
And I think it’s very important for a founder to understand that you can do all kinds of small tasks yourself. Whether it is managing contracts or managing payroll or do some of the accounting or build the product roadmap.
But all of these smaller tasks will at some point eat up and stack up and stack up and before you know it, eat up all your time. So it is very important to make sure that very quickly and find the right people around you that can set up their own processes and let them run their processes because you will become a bottleneck.
And you will become that person that is actually slowing down the business because you want to perhaps take or keep too much control. But I think that’s very important. Plus a lot of people would expect the founder to hold all the answers.
They come to you for all kinds of questions, but you know, honestly, I rarely have the answer, but I know where to find the answer or who to ask to get that answer. And I think that the most important part in being a founder is understanding where you can go and what support you have around you to get the answers that you’re looking for and understand what resources to tap on.
So those are things that I really learned to really make use of much better. And indeed, just don’t be afraid to ask the question. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Don’t be afraid to step into that uncomfortable conversation perhaps with meeting somebody new and asking them for support over insights. That’s where you can see that people are really excited to support you and to make you a success.
How were you able to build your team and how did you put systems and processes in place that will help in the smooth running of Zazu?
In 2024, that’s the last year, things were obviously a bit more chaotic because we were just running around all kinds of places to do everything. But at the end of 2024, we started to put in place very clear goals and very clear deadlines and very clear responsibilities along with those goals.
So making it very easy to understand, okay, we have these sets of goals that we need to reach by the quarter or by mid-year or by the end of the year. Who’s responsible for that goal? And do they have the tools and the resources they need to actually achieve that?
That’s first and foremost, setting up people, setting them up for success and letting them make their own decisions on how to best achieve that. But other than that, it is important to also know there are weekly interactions to just understand what’s happening, where can we support each other, what do we need to spar on together to actually make this happen.
We are using monday.com for this, a knowledge center, knowledge tool, if you will, knowledge creation and retention tool that has been helping us a lot in making it all accessible very quickly and very easily. That’s been the backbone of us so far to really make sure data gets shared properly.
We are still with a very small team. So it’s a bit easier to manage all of this because there’s only that many people that you need to liaise with. But this is going to set us up for scaling that out as well because these people will be able to grow up their own teams, set up their own sub goals with that.
And as mentioned before, I think ownership and making them feel that they can have a true impact on the company and on their goals is what’s making people very successful and very and very happy in that role.
What advice would you give to non-Africans who would love to build their start-up here in Africa?
I would say don’t be afraid or shy by looking at the media or whatnot. Just go there, figure it out for yourself and find that gap. Be convinced of something and then just go full force. Just go.
Doesn’t matter what everybody is saying. Have two, three, four pieces of advice around you that you’re listening to, and for the rest you ignore all the noise. That’s not gonna help you at all. Just focus hardcore on what you believe is the right thing to do.
And very quickly you will find out that there’s more and more people that are rooting for you to actually win. Visit as many places as you can, talk with as many people as you can in the market, just to understand how they think. What are the exact problems because nobody else is going to tell you better than the actual potential customers that you need to build for.
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