A little while ago we wrote an article on the regulatory vacuum relating to equity crowdfunding. Whilst there has been little movement from a regulatory perspective as to how South Africa is going to regulate crowdfunding – meaning that it is still unregulated – there have been some positive steps taken by the Financial Services Board (“the FSB“). Crowdfunding has been at the forefront of the FSB’s recent discussions – hopefully an indication of their support.
If you are unfamiliar with the term “crowdfunding” and you have looked to “professor” Google to gain a bit of an understanding of what it is, here is a small overview on what crowdfunding is and the types that are available.
The term “crowdfunding” is essentially a description of a funding raise of multiple (typically small) sums of money from the general public to fund some form of venture, whether that be a charitable venture or a profit-making venture.
- Donations based crowdfunding is fairly straightforward – a group of people donate money to an organisation or person that they believe in, generally for a charitable cause. Backabuddy is a good example of this in motion in South Africa.
- Rewards based crowdfunding is widely used to incentivise people to fund the venture of a small business. This is similar to donations based crowdfunding, but with a key difference, as the person seeking funding offers a reward to the person / people donating. Thundafund is an example of a South African rewards based crowdfunding platform.
- Loan based crowdfunding occurs where the person / company borrows money from the crowd and the crowd receives interest as their return. Entrepreneurs typically use this to get a better interest rate than they would have gotten if they went to the more established money lenders.
- ICO’s (Initial Coin Offerings) have become the most recent of the crowdfunding fads. Unfortunately, there have been a few notorious fraudulent schemes using ICO’s. In fact, the Useless Ethereum Token famously launched a satirical ICO that clearly stated that its coins were worth nothing and it raised USD$93,949 (+/- R1 million)! ICO’s are fairly complex, so we are not going to go into them in this article, but if you would like to see a previous article written on the subject, you can read about it here.
- Equity based crowdfunding occurs where shares in a company are offered to the public in exchange for funding. This is really significant as the crowd become business owners of the company and have certain rights attached to their investment.
Equity based crowdfunding has previously been avoided in South Africa, as people are generally wary of entering a space like this due to the regulatory concerns. Uprise.Africa (which has already had its soft launch) has, however, started an equity based crowdfunding operation in South Africa and is about to become fully operational.
What’s the difference?
Equity based crowdfunding differs significantly from its more underpowered cousins, as shareholders in a company (even minority ones) have certain rights that they can exercise to ensure that startups aren’t off buying bean bags and half-price sushi with investor funds. This means that the crowd has some oversight and can share in the rewards or growth of the business. So, the crowd is rewarded in the long term for investing into the startup (although most startups are high-risk investments and returns are not very common).
What this means for the startup is that they can market test their product to see whether the general public would be interested in the investment. It also means that the startup can probably get a more favourable investment than your average venture capital (“VC“) firm would give as the crowd isn’t normally as interested in the bottom line of the startup as your average VC firm is.
Equity crowdfunding has such huge potential to boost the South African economy, in fact the World Bank recently predicted that the market potential in Africa for crowdfunding will be up to $2.5 billion by 2025. Equity crowdfunding in South Africa will hopefully tap into that and unleash significant potential in the startups that are based here.
