How a Brother’s Wake Up Call Sparked a Financial Revolution and Inspired a Journey Toward Stability

In the quiet hours of a Cape Town evening, *Abu Addae was knee-deep in spreadsheets, long after the city had gone to sleep. What he was working through wasn’t some corporate earnings report or executive boardroom presentation. It was his younger sister’s insurance paperwork.

She was a newly qualified doctor, proud and full of promise. But the stack of policies she’d been sold - life cover totalling millions despite having no dependents, savings plans while still paying off student debt - didn’t sit right. As a qualified actuary and an executive at one of South Africa’s leading insurers, Abu ran the numbers. The conclusions were jarring. “She would’ve had to work an extra 15 years if she kept those policies,” he says. “That haunted me.”

He hadn’t looked at the documents for 18 months. That night, something shifted. The guilt was sharp - but so was the realization: if someone as smart as my sister couldn’t navigate this, how many others are at risk?

This wasn’t just about flawed financial products. It was about dignity. About how ordinary people - smart, hardworking, ambitious people- were being failed by a system geared towards selling products, not solutions. That personal reckoning became the seed of a bigger question: What would it look like if financial advice started with the person, not the product?

Years later, a change in Abu’s own personal circumstances brought him full circle, once again facing the challenges of an industry that offers one-size-fits-all products, but no step-by-step plan.

He was recently married and realised he had to review and re-order his finances and investments. By now he was an exco member at one of the country’s largest insurers, with over 22 000 people and more than 5 000 financial advisors. “My position at the company allowed me to request advice from the top financial advisors in the business,” he recalls. But I soon realised, that they were selling – not solving.

The disconnect gnawed at him. “I thought: if I can’t get this right, how will my cousins, my neighbours, the next generation?”

That quiet frustration gradually turned into a calling.

Together with like-minded colleagues, Dylan Flint and Shen Tian, Abu began working on a solution. Using their professional experience and skills to address the wide-spread problem that they had identified.

What followed was the accreditation and establishment of Lifecheq in 2015.

The early days weren’t glamorous. Many of the first financial plans went to friends and family - some of the “most expensive plans ever written,” Abu laughs. But these sessions became windows into what people really wanted: a life plan, not a product. They didn’t want to know which financial products to buy. They wanted to know if they could afford a sabbatical in two years, buy a house, take care of their parents, or launch a dream business.

That insight was everything.

“Lifecheq was never just about money,” Abu explains. “It was about helping ordinary people change the trajectory of their lives by helping them think more clearly and act more decisively?”

And they did. One client went from junior employee at a creative agency in Johannesburg to a proud business owner - of that same agency. Another paid off her home in seven years. “It’s in these moments that I realize… we’re not in financial services. We’re in the business of transformation.”

But success brought its own problems. By their third year, demand had exploded, and clients were waiting weeks to meet with a consultant. “We thought the challenge would be getting people interested,” Abu says. “But the real challenge was scale.”

That’s when Lifecheq evolved - from a firm offering smart financial advice to a fintech platform that could make that advice scalable. They began partnering with some of South Africa’s largest insurance businesses, empowering their host of external advisors to use Lifecheq’s enabling proprietary technology and underlying solutions-based advice process. “We weren’t just building a business,” Abu says. “We were building an ecosystem.”

Even then, Lifecheq’s journey wasn’t without moments of doubt. One funding round collapsed midway through due diligence. “It gets existential quickly,” Abu admits. “You’re asking people to believe in something that’s not fully built yet.” But a handful of investors - drawn to the clarity of purpose and grit behind the numbers - stayed. That faith helped Lifecheq reframe its story, refine its model, and grow stronger.

Abu credits the early partnerships with various institutional and non-institutional investors, and the strategic guidance provided by them, with helping Lifecheq navigate through the early years to now having an established offering with over 8,000 financial advisers using Lifecheq’ s technology annually.

At the core of that model is a deeply personal principle: impact before optics. Lifecheq isn’t just proud of how many financial plans it has produced for ordinary individuals - it measures its success by how many lives have been moved forward, how many careers it has helped financial advisors build, and how many times a client has said, “I didn’t think this was possible.”

Abu’s leadership has been defined not by bold slogans, but by quiet, stubborn belief: that everyone - regardless of background - deserves a roadmap to a life they can be proud of. “You’ll hit a point,” he says, “where the problem you’re solving asks for everything you have. And more. You need a deep why to keep going.”

He found his why years ago, in a forgotten stack of paperwork.

In 2024, Lifecheq celebrated another major milestone. Lifecheq secured its largest equity investment to date, a R160 million share subscription by the Summit Private Equity Fund, adding to its already established list of shareholders such as Naspers Foundry, Futuregrowth and African Rainbow Capital. As an established impact-focused private equity investor, Summit was drawn to Lifecheq’s compelling combination of commercial scalability and deep social purpose. Lifecheq wasn’t just solving for financial literacy—it was unlocking economic mobility for thousands of ordinary people across South Africa.

Looking ahead, the new capital will be used to improve Lifecheq’s technology offering, enabling it to serve its existing clients better. Preparation has also begun on expanding Lifecheq’s geographic footprint to emerging markets in the rest of Africa and Asia, where financial product providers, financial intermediaries and financial advisers are seeking solution-orientated approaches to client acquisition and retention. With the right traction and partners, Abu envisions a world where high-quality financial planning is no longer a luxury, but a baseline service available to the billions of ordinary people who need it most.

“I don’t want us to be the most famous brand in a village,” he says. “I want us to be the best in the world at what we do - because people’s lives depend on it.”

And at the end of the day, that’s what he wants Lifecheq to be remembered for - not its valuation, or even its impressive tech stack. But for the moments when someone dared to dream a little bigger, simply because they had a plan.

*Abu Addae is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of LifeCheq, a South African fintech company focused on democratising access to financial advice through technology. Learn more about Lifecheq: https://www.lifecheq.co.za/