Tale guide

Cash Connect's amazing journey

During the course of 2005 Ann and I were touring Namibia towards the end of a twelve-month sabbatical that we had taken following my retirement from Fidelity Cash Management Services.

One warm and sunny day found us sitting on the Lüderitz quayside watching seagulls circle and swoop over a heavily laden fishing trawler as it made its way into the calm waters of the docks.

My cell phone rang, and I heard my very good friend Theo de Oliveira greet me warmly as he had done on so many occasions in the past.

Theo was a director of the then QD Group and he was quite intent and persuasive that we should pack up our touring lark and come home so that I could join QD’s board of Directors.

It wasn’t long after joining them before I migrated from a consultant to managing sales. It was during this time that we were introduced to an early version of a smart safe – an intelligent cash depositing device into which a retailer could feed his bank notes via a banknote validator which would count the deposit and transmit the value counted to a central webserver.

The cash would drop into a sealable, tamper evident bag mounted inside a virtually impenetrable safe, ready for collection by a Cash in Transit operator.

South Africa was no stranger to armed robbery and cash theft and we recognised the potential of developing a service to the retail market in which we could use this technology to offer an automated next day value deposit service on the back of full risk transfer; A service that could potentially revolutionise the historically tedious, costly, and dangerous handling of cash in retail shops across the land.

Cash Connect was born and the QD team asked me to lead the project.

The ensuing years were really tough as we battled on against all odds to build the business, continuously hampered by a lack of sufficient capitalisation, a wary market and a lack of experience as we confronted the many challenges the model presented.

But we persevered, went through two change of ownerships, and slowly but steadily grew, customer by customer, until late 2013 when the company was sold to a consortium led by Steven Heilbron and Ivan Epstein.

This acquisition signalled a significant turning point in the fortunes of Cash Connect. The gentleman’s agreement entered into between Steven and I entailed my staying on for three years to help guide the ship with him.

The reward that resulted from the significant success of the Connect Group came second only to the friendship and comradeship I have enjoyed with Steven over the years that followed. In the end I remained an integral part of the team all the way up until 2019, when I retired from an executive role.

However, when Covid struck in early 2020 and the future looked uncertain, I was glad to have been able to stay with the team through most of that year, by which time it had become evident that the company would not only survive the pandemic but would continue to thrive and grow. 

My farewell

The Connect team pulled out all the stops in organising a fantastic farewell in November of 2019.

It signalled not only an end to my Cash Connect adventure, but the last professional challenge of my life.

The farewell plans were kept secret from me and were organised to coincided with our 2019 year end company party in Sandton. Ann and I flew up to Johannesburg for the occassion.

It was a humbling experience and it turned out to be a lot more emotional than I bargained for. It took every ounce of strength to hold it together when I finally made my thank you speech.

Our colleagues and friends, some of whom had been with us from the early years, were incredibly generous and truly embraced us with their love, warmth and kindness.

Cash Connect has been, without doubt, the most rewarding journey of them all thanks to the dedication and hard work of each and every member of the team, but most of all, the trust that they placed in me all the way to the end.

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All the best