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SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting with Charles Savage, CEO of the Purple Group. Disclaimer – I hold shares in Purple Group. Results for the six months ending February 2026 saw revenue up 8.8%, Heps up 21%.
Charles, I appreciate the time. I think in the second line in your results document you refer to ‘operational leverage’. This is the power of scale and is absolutely working. I think you say revenue is up 11 times faster than costs.
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CHARLES SAVAGE: Yes. Thanks for having me on, Simon. As always, it’s the interest and the shareholder interest too. These results really do highlight the efficiencies of building a platform that scales; for every R1 that we spend, we’re getting R11 return now in revenue.
And while that’s exactly what we set out to do almost 12 years ago, I guess the proof is always in the pudding – and we’re serving lots of desserts. It’s good to see in the numbers, finally.
SIMON BROWN: Some numbers. Revenue per active client, R159. Cost of service in that client, R82. Cost to acquire them at R77. That was down some 35%. Is that scale or was there something more particular to that?
CHARLES SAVAGE: I have to give credit to the team. We’ve worked really hard on improving our conversion, journeying, messaging, tactics and marketing, and it has taken them the better part of two or three years to make sure that they’ve got the right data points and present the messages to our customers at the right moment in time in their journey. And you saw that, but it’s one of the numbers that I haven’t seen highlighted yet.
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But we doubled the number of new investors in the period over the previous period. So there was 100% growth in new investors in this six months versus last six months. And that is 100% credit to the conversion team, because we onboarded the same number of customers in terms of registrations, roughly. It was slightly ahead.
But it is credit to the team. They are getting better and better at using data and right-moment-in-time marketing campaigns to convert customers through this funnel.
SIMON BROWN: There’s also something else that I saw, and maybe I’m just reading it wrong. But active clients were up 21.9%, registered clients up 17%. In other words, clients you registered before the period then suddenly funded.
In other words, you’re getting them on, and then down the line they fund that account, which is a big deal as well. This could be someone who signed up a year or three ago.
CHARLES SAVAGE: That’s exactly right. What I’m kind of highlighting is that we’re getting much better at looking back at our customer cohorts and saying, ‘Why didn’t you fund?’ – and then addressing that friction point.
As you know, there are something like 2.8 million customers who’ve registered, 1.2 million who’ve converted, which leaves 1.6 million unconverted opportunities which, if we can continue to get better at converting, present a nice pool of customers for the future.
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SIMON BROWN: Absolutely. How about cross-selling, because there are a number? Obviously the big product is the EasyEquities. But you’ve got a lot beyond that. You have EasyTrader, you have EasyProperty, you have EasyCrypto. You have all the other bits and pieces. How is the cross-selling of products doing?
CHARLES SAVAGE: It’s doing really well. On average customers now hold more than two products, and I think it’s the first time that that has happened. We were just below two. So we’re getting better at converting them across the platform.
There are still some massive improvement points to make. We think that the platform does really well around one or two conversion journeys, but as we’ve grown product and we’ve grown those products or added those products really quickly, we haven’t considered what the user experience should be for that specific product inside the platform.
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As an example, our EasyProtect, which is our life insurance, is a great product – and I’m not talking as a CEO. It’s a great life insurance product for investors. Where it fits into the platform doesn’t present it well for our customers.
So we have to rethink where we are with the product placement on our platform. And the opportunity to convert more customers into more products has to be one of the biggest opportunities we have – for the simple reason that there is zero cost to acquire. And we understand so much more about them because they’re right in front of us.
SIMON BROWN: Yes. They literally click a button and bang, there’s a new product for them.
Total client assets? If we look at retail assets about R63-odd billion, R94.9 [billion] on the entire platform, how much of this was market growth versus client deposits?
CHARLES SAVAGE: It was roughly 50:50. Client deposits were the biggest they have ever been. We continue to send into records month on month through the period and February smashed that record out of the park.
Then March pitched up and smashed it out of the park again.
So clients are doing their part in terms of pitching up with more capital every single year.
But the market this year also played its part. SA has done very well into the February close. Obviously March was a bit testy for our customers, but fundamentally the market returned half of that growth and our customers pitched up for the other half.
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SIMON BROWN: We have chatted about this before, and the last time was probably on Liberation Day, which was approximately exactly a year ago. Evidence suggests that when things get wild and woolly in the markets, which they frankly do from time to time, your clients kind of just bunker down and don’t panic, which is Investing 101.
CHARLES SAVAGE: Yes. Simon, every time a market dislocation happens – like we’ve just seen in March – I sit there nervously waiting for our customers to pitch up. And every single time they pitch up. Twelve years later I really should get over the nerves.
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These customers behave exactly as they should, but not as the rhetoric said they would a decade ago. And so they do exactly that – a dislocation or, if you like. In a sharp downward move they find more capital in that month to take advantage of that opportunity, and every time they do it, they get well rewarded.
SIMON BROWN: Absolutely, as we’re witnessing with the ‘peace in our time’ rally.
A last question. The Philippines – we have chatted a bunch around this over the years. Regulatory challenges have been a headache, but it does seem back on track.
CHARLES SAVAGE: Yes, we’re in the sandbox. We have live customers. There’s a roadmap that’s been agreed to – more customers, and so we can start to get excited about the future of that market. It won’t pitch up in our income statement, just given the scale of the business that it is today.
And the thing that that I’m most proud about is that when we went into this set of results we had just come off a record set of results, and in order to produce these kinds of results you’re compounding off big numbers. So The Philippines is an exciting roadmap for the next three, five and 10 years.
It’s great to start getting some runs on the board now, but it has a big income statement to compete with in South Africa, and our current opportunity in terms of lifting our income statement into the next few periods is right here at home.
SIMON BROWN: Absolutely. I take your point on that, and it is a big number. I should have gone up front – you crossed the quarter of a billion for the first time in revenue.
We’ll leave it there. Charles Savage, CEO Purple Group, I always appreciate the time.
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