Taking Stock

2024 sees us enter Sparkle’s 5th year of existence and so we must take stock. We are more focussed this year; although one thing is certain. Sparkle is still not a fintech, yet we will never be a traditional bank.

We started as a digital banking platform with a micro finance licence. We spent time understanding the market, understanding different generations of people who needed different and varied banking services. We looked at how to build products and services for different income classes and also we wanted to understand how different genders interacted with banking services. We took our time to understand the market[s]. We started with a bold vision; to give consumers a better experience and to leverage technology to create a seamless integration between their finances and their lifestyle, using their own data to give them back information on themselves and make informed decisions. Their data powers their choices. This then manifested in our first roll-out of “Sparkle Wrapped” a couple of weeks ago — a visualisation of the data to give full transparency to their financial habits.

The second part of our mission and journey was to grow and enable small businesses — providing them with solutions where they gained access to services previously out of scope for them. By embedding invoicing, payroll, taxation and more into Sparkle, we democratised access to professional business services…