Speaking to HumanIPO Ben Fourie, co-founder of 88pockets said the company is a product of its predecessor, Newco Holdings, which served to assist people in becoming successful property investors by helping them make the right decisions and take the right actions when sourcing property to purchase.
In the Newco Holdings days, Fourie said: “We developed software for ourselves, to help us manage other people’s property portfolios. When we made the move to say we want to now actually develop software for end-users directly, we had a nice base to do that.”
In September 2009 4D Financial approached Newco holdings to create an online property portfolio management solution for their clients.
Together with Fourie’s qualification as a chartered accountant and his business partner Marnus Weststrate’s education in computer and microelectronic engineering, 88pockets was born and by April last year was tried and tested.
Property Frontier, described as the first pocket of the Pretoria-based company, was launched in February this year. Property Frontier, as its name indicates, serves property investors to manage their investments and portfolios.
Property Frontier is “a typical software as a service model, so it is cloud based. Everything happens over the internet. You can log in through a desktop, a laptop or an iPad,” said Fourie.
Although the application is not optimised for mobile, it functions “100 percent fine” on mobile phones.
“Our whole vision is to develop this financial investment application that can help you find out which investments to buy, make it easy for you to invest and then also make your investments unique to you,” said Fourie.
Property Frontier may be the first pocket of 88pockets, but Fourie confirms it certainly will not be the last.
“For us investing is a very broad concept and it even includes investing in a good cause. So if you want to spend your money on a property, that’s one thing, but if you want to invest in a good cause, like saving the rhino, is also another thing,” said Fourie.
Fourie said the future plans for 88pockets includes more applications that will be dedicated to a specific investment area, such as charity or shares.
Furthermore, Fourie intends to integrate the future applications into a platform, which will be convenient for those who invest in various areas.
“The overall goal of what we want to achieve is an all in one investment application. The idea for this investment application is to help you decide which investment is the best, even if you decide to give money away to charity, you would want to decide which charity to invest in and what is going to give you the most meaning,” said Fourie.
Fourie added he and Westrate are passionate about contributing to or giving back to society.
“Individuals and investors need to see that [giving back to society] as an investment as well and they should treat their charity investments in the same way and take the same type of care in decision making that they would [in] investing in a property or a specific company.”
According to Fourie the reason behind 88pockets’ name is due to the number eight representing infinity and connection and the pockets relate to the different software applications, such as Property Frontier.
