We started this because ordinary people were getting short-changed.
Not by any one villain. By an industry whose default settings (opaque fees, impenetrable jargon, advice that quietly optimises for the wrong person) have been quietly costing people their retirements for decades.
The problem we kept running into.
Every person we spoke to had the same story. Somewhere along the way, a friend-of-a-friend put them into a product they didn't fully understand. The fees were hidden inside returns. The statements were incomprehensible. The annual review, if it happened at all, felt like a sales call.
And because talking about money is hard, most people just stopped opening the statements. Retirement became something to worry about later.
That's the real competitor to good financial planning: not other platforms, not robo-advisors. The ostrich response. Fear wearing the clothes of procrastination.
The people who started it.
Eugene Maree spent 25 years inside financial services: investment banking at Standard Bank, retail advisory at STANLIB, then running Liberty Life's independent advisor division. He saw how the industry worked from every angle, and built enough conviction about what was missing to start building it himself.
Eugene founded Harbour Wealth (an FSP with one of the highest licence categories in the country, and some of the lowest fees, 1.5% all-in) and Wealthport, the first independent LISP in South Africa to accommodate ETFs and structured products. SimVida is what sits on top of all of that: the layer that makes fair, transparent financial planning actually usable for normal people.
Peter Koen is a UX designer with 20 years of work in financial services, insurance, and enterprise technology. He sold his shares in InfoSlips (the electronic communications platform serving 65% of the JSE Top 100) and went looking for the next thing to build. He met Eugene. The rest is this website.
Fiona Butler keeps the operation honest. 12+ years in insurance: underwriting, claims, operations. BPharm. Former Olympic hockey player. Cares, loudly, about clients actually getting value from their cover.
Serious motivation. Kind tools.
The founders have spent careers inside financial services. They've seen what happens when the defaults (opaque fees, dense paperwork, statements people have learned not to open) quietly push ordinary people further away from the plans they deserve. SimVida is their answer to that, built from the inside.
The product itself has to feel like the opposite of the problem it's solving. Calm, clear, patient, encouraging. Meeting scared people where they are, and showing them one small thing they can do that genuinely helps.
It's built with advisors in mind, too. The ones who already work this way, and who've been asking for tools that match what they already believe in.
Built in South Africa. Built for people who've been let down before.
We're a small, senior team, in Cape Town and Johannesburg. We've lived inside this industry long enough to know what's broken. SimVida is us trying to fix the part we can fix: the tools.
Want to see it?
Two minutes, no sign-up required. See what a clearer picture of your money looks like.