Author: Toby Shapshak

Frustrated Joburg motorists have spent the last month dodging council employees painting new road markings. Normally, such upkeep would be welcomed, but it hardly seems like the most pressing necessity, given the gaping potholes on most of those roads. Someone in my suburb has spray painted the word ANC in bright green next to each pothole, which they have helpfully circled in the same lurid colour. This phenomenon is happening all over Joburg. It’s an apt metaphor for the state of the country. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s much-delayed cabinet reshuffle was a bit like those new road signs, painting over the…

Discovery Insure has taken a similar behavioural-based system to Vitality in the car insurance industry. If you drive better, Vitality Drive will reduce your premiums. This incentive-based driver behaviour programme, launched in 2011, monitors how you drive and then rewards you for driving well. Those onboard monitors can tell if you are in an accident and call you. If needed, they alert emergency services, which are dispatched faster. Discovery Insure deputy CEO Francois Theron tells Stuff editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak about this remarkable offering, which has been exported to the UK and Middle East. Good drivers are rewarded with Discovery Insure

How do I compare the new ChatGPT-enabled Bing with Google when I haven’t used the monopolist for about four years? Microsoft’s also-ran search engine has recently received a major boost from the generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot made by OpenAI, another company co-founded by Elon Musk. Invited to the closed beta test, I have been using Bing for the last few weeks. Or trying to use it by searching more, so I can see how good this new form of so-called generative search is. The chat functionality appears down the right side of the screen – in Microsoft’s Edge browser,…

How did a neobank less than five years old win a string of awards and acknowledgements? The most prominent of which was receiving the Ask Afrika Orange Index 2022 awards for best banking app, the best call centre, and the best overall client experience in South Africa. Fortune magazine also selected the bank in its 2022 Change the World list, while MyBroadband recognised it as the online banking platform with the most positive app store reviews in South Africa. The soft-spoken Akash Dowra, head of technical marketing and client insights at Discovery Bank, tells Stuff editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak how it became so accomplished.…

Not only has Shoprite won the first round of the app delivery wars, but it has also quietly been offering banking services to its customers. How did a grocer evolve into such a commanding position, to the point where it has a general manager of financial services? Stuff editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak asks Jean Olivier in this latest episode of T2S2’s fintech podcast series. How Shoprite became a bank Hear more: ShopriteX CEO Neil Schreuder telling Shapshak how Checkers Sixty60 changed the grocery delivery game

Discovery’s Vitality wellness program is a clever way of incentivising people to live more healthily. That’s the simplest way of putting what has become the gold standard for health-related initiatives. To call it a loyalty system is to miss how deeply and potentially life-changing its impetus can be. From the original offerings of cheaper gym contracts and movie tickets, Vitality has evolved into a remarkable service into a great example of behavioural economics, which incorporates how psychology has evolved people’s decision-making. Dinesh Govender, the long-time CEO of Discovery Vitality, tells Stuff editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak – a self-confessed non-practising health fanatic –…

Dr Ryan Noach is about the only person I can think of who could succeed the legendary Adrian Gore as CEO and Dr Jonathan Broomberg of Discovery Health. He’s hard to miss. The medical doctor is also an ardent health fanatic and a pilot. He’s been part of the Discovery mix for years and nobody was surprised when he took over the health division of what is now a larger financial services industry. He spent two years working on Discovery Bank, which not only continues to grow but provides another arrow in the group’s quiver. I sat down with Noach…

Google makes at least thirty cents of every US dollar in advertising for website publishers, the US government says in a groundbreaking antitrust lawsuit. Filed last month, the lawsuit is over “violations of the Sherman Act to halt Google’s anticompetitive scheme, unwind Google’s monopolistic grip on the market, and restore competition to digital advertising,” argues the US government and several States. The 133-year-old antitrust act is the principal US legislation to prevent monopolistic abuse, and has been previously evoked against Microsoft in 1999. While search is the biggest source of revenue for Google and its parent company Alphabet, it makes…

Unsurprisingly, it was a tweet that caused the most recent troubles for Elon Musk. On August 7, 2018, Musk tweeted “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” The ‘420’ is a weed joke, considered to be the right time of the afternoon to light a joint, and a meme Musk had recently discovered. The man who would later buy Twitter for $44 billion and call himself “chief twit” later added: “Investor support is confirmed. Only reason why this is not certain is that it’s contingent on a shareholder vote.” As expected, Tesla’s share price surged for three weeks,…

There was a huge outcry when Elon Musk summarily fired half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees and most of its contractors when he took over last October. That was a lot of people suddenly out of jobs. But that was just the beginning. Not long afterwards, Facebook cut 11,000 people. Its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has almost as little EQ as Musk, seemed almost benign and civilised compared to the head-on-fire Tesla CEO. Amazon kicked off the year, saying it would retrench 18,000 workers. Having “weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past,” CEO Andy Jassy wrote to staff, “these changes…