POD - Prince Nwadeyi of SAG Ventures: building solutions corporates commission but won't execute themselves
Prince Nwadeyi unpacks how aligning incentives across value chains turns corporate muscle and founder execution into profitable innovation, and why Mustard Finance Group's reported 99.9% repayment rate proves the model works.
Episode overview:
Prince Nwadeyi spent years providing market research that unlocked South Africa's R600 billion (~USD 34.4 billion) informal economy for blue-chip clients. The likes of Swiss Re, Liberty, NASPARS all wanted the insights. Few wanted the execution risk.
In conversation with Andile Masuku, Nwadeyi explains why his holding company SAG Ventures stopped selling insights and started building businesses. From Mustard Finance Group (formerly Setana Capital) providing working capital to township spaza shops (micro convenience store), to Purchase Pal embedding funeral cover into everyday groceries, Nwadeyi's ventures share a common thread: aligning incentives across entire value chains whilst playing a longer game than quarterly-focused corporates can stomach.
His journey from UCT postgrad researcher to operator deploying millions in credit with a claimed 99.9% repayment rate offers a masterclass in strategic patience and the power of granular consumer understanding.
Key insights:
- On why insights alone don't create impact: "We realised that some of the executives were not willing to take the risk, not for any risk of their own, but really just how the incentive structure set up within corporate." Nwadeyi discovered that knowing differently doesn't translate to acting differently when bonuses hang in the balance. The solution? Stop asking permission and build the innovation yourself.
- On aligning incentives to unlock impossible markets: Working capital finance to informal retailers seemed impossible until Nwadeyi mapped the ecosystem. Wholesalers wanted more sales but couldn't offer credit. They did have transaction data. "Can we build a technology solution that interprets that data at scale to enable unique insight that traditional finance institutions don't have access to?" The result: finance the stock purchase to the wholesaler, the SME repays over 14 days, everyone wins. One of their spaza shop clients recently scaled from one store to three and bought her first house for R1 million (~USD 57,400) cash.
- On corporate partnerships as strategic positioning, not permission-seeking: "Corporate sits with parts of the infrastructure. Think about corporate as an organisation that's got muscle, but their biggest challenge is how do we leverage this muscle in the most effective way?" Nwadeyi's advice: understand what makes you indispensable, anticipate when that advantage fades, and consistently evolve your value proposition. Relationships matter, but so does clear-eyed assessment of your strategic position.
- On thinking in decades whilst executing in months: "You don't have to think in days. You have to think in decades." Purchase Pal (what Nwadeyi claims to be "the world's first FMCG-embedded funeral insurance") represents one piece of a five-year strategy spanning multiple financial services verticals. The long game enables patient execution whilst maintaining corporate relevance. "What's my exit point? What's my entry point? Am I wanting to build this alongside?"
- On why research beats assumptions every time: A tearful interview during his MPhil research - a woman describing the humiliation of borrowing money to bury her mother whilst neighbours gossiped about her poverty - sparked the Purchase Pal concept. "What if we could unlock quote unquote, what I call, no cost insurance?" Years of ethnographic research revealed the margin structure in FMCG goods, the cost burden of traditional insurance intermediation, and the customer stickiness problem facing consumer goods manufacturers. Research made the impossible obvious.
Notable moments:
1. The pivot from consultant to operator: Walking through a Cape Flats township, Nwadeyi's co-founder encountered a spaza shop owner struggling for financing. "All I ever wanted to do is to feed myself, feed my family or feed my business." That human story, repeated across thousands of township retailers, shifted SAG from insight provider to solution builder. Traditional finance wouldn't touch these operators. Nwadeyi's team reportedly deployed over R100 million (~USD 5.7 million) and achieved 99.9% repayment rates.
2. The birthday policy payout: Purchase Pal's first claim created an unexpectedly emotional moment. "The first policy that we paid out, the consumer had bought the policy on my birthday. They passed away on the 10th of May. I was born on the 17th of April." A family received funeral cover because they'd purchased participating FMCG products at Big Save. No forms, no premiums, no waiting period—just automatic protection from routine shopping. "This person didn't have to pay for it. Technically, they were already paying for it because they buy the groceries every month."
3. The Professor John Simpson lecture that started everything: Back around 2015, during a UCT marketing class, Prof John Simpson mentioned South Africa's informal sector was valued at R600 billion; twice agriculture's GDP contribution. More striking: "Lack of data on township markets are fundamentally the biggest barrier to brands and businesses being able to unlock return, but far more importantly to serve those consumers." Nwadeyi was 23. That lecture became a business, which became a portfolio of businesses solving problems corporates identified but couldn't execute.
Andile Masuku
Why nimble operators win:
Nwadeyi's trajectory reveals an uncomfortable truth for corporates: knowing what needs doing and actually doing it require fundamentally different organisational capabilities. Large institutions possess distribution muscle, balance sheets, and regulatory relationships. They lack the speed, customer intimacy, and risk appetite to execute breakthrough innovation in underserved markets.
The partnership model works when founders control innovation velocity whilst leveraging corporate infrastructure. Purchase Pal succeeds because SAG designed the embedded insurance model, proved it works, then partnered with Sanlam for underwriting scale. The insurer gains efficient customer acquisition; the FMCG manufacturers gain customer stickiness; consumers gain invisible protection. Nwadeyi's team captured value by architecting the entire system before approaching partners.
"Entrepreneurs are not just meant to be innovators, they're meant to be masters at relationships," Nwadeyi observes. But mastery means understanding power dynamics, anticipating when your leverage peaks, and building defensibility into partnership structures. It means thinking five steps ahead whilst executing today's priorities with precision.