Jaco joined Fundi in March 2022 following the closure of IPS, where he also served as CFO.
On 1 March 2022, Jaco Joubert was appointed as the group CFO of Fundi Capital, one of South Africa’s leading education finance and education fund management solution specialists.
“I am extremely excited to be joining Fundi, as it is aligned to two areas that are very important to me and close to my heart: driving financial inclusivity and the power of education,” Jaco says.
Prior to joining Fundi, Jaco served as the CFO of Integrated Processing Solutions (IPS), a joint venture between Absa and Standard Bank. “Following the recent changes in the South African payments landscape, which included the sunsetting of cheques as a payment instrument in the country from 31 December 2020, IPS shareholders reassessed their need for a separate vehicle to process an array of their transactions,” he explains, adding that IPS was subsequently closed.
Once Jaco had completed a series of handovers and transitions of the services back into the bank, he decided it was time to move on to his next career and wound up at Fundi.
“During my work with IPS on low value payments, I became aware of the very large section of our population who are unbanked and underbanked, leading to a very low level of financial inclusivity. Fundi disrupts this situation by providing education finance to students who may not have been able to access that finance through traditional banking channels,” he says.
Jaco is a firm believer in the importance and power of education and lifelong learning, and wants to live in a world where everyone has access to affordable and quality education. “The main reason in South Africa for the non-attendance of educational institutions is the lack of finances to fund student tuition. Fundi is the only credit provider solely focused on providing these funds.”
As the group CFO for Fundi and its subsidiaries, Jaco is now responsible for the full spectrum of activities of the finance, risk and accounting departments. “Specific responsibilities include formulating and driving the finance strategy, and ensuring that it is aligned with and supports the overall Fundi strategy, which is centred around what we call ‘phygital migration’.”
He explains that this strategy aims to adopt and advance Fundi’s digital roadmap, while optimising the physical interactions with customers that are crucial to the nature of the organisation.
Jaco is also responsible for the legal, risk and compliance practices within the group. “This ensures that Fundi complies with financial and legal requirements, as well as maintaining a high standard of corporate governance and ethics,” he says.
In this new role, Jaco hopes to “develop a lending solution to specifically target the students who are too poor to afford university themselves but not poor enough to qualify for government funding, or the ‘missing middle’, to ensure more inclusive access to education finance”.
Jaco has previously served in various finance management roles at companies including Q Holdings and the Auditor General of South Africa. He has a MSc accounting and finance degree from the Manchester Metropolitan University, a BCompt degree in accounting science from the University of South Africa, and has completed the management development programme at Stellenbosch University.
