A Pretoria-born financial education start-up, Fintr, is discovering that its biggest breakout product is not the app it first imagined, but a board game called FinMaster that is now selling across South Africa and even has a foothold in the United States. For a company built around teaching money habits, the twist is a telling one: people are choosing to learn about wealth, risk and investing at the kitchen table rather than on a screen.
The rapid rise of FinMaster has caught even its founders off guard. Fintr co-founder Danei Rall says the business began with a straightforward mission: help people understand money better, but in a way that actually lands with the audience in front of them. As we’ve seen with a growing number of South African edtech and fintech ventures, the product that wins is not always the one initially planned on the whiteboard.
Rall and business partner Elijah Djan met at the University of Pretoria and first spent two years running personal finance workshops for adults. Again and again, they heard the same regret from attendees: “I wish I’d learnt this stuff as a kid.” That feedback changed the direction of the company in 2023, when Fintr shifted its attention to children and younger learners.
At first, the team believed the answer would be a pocket-money app. They conducted research with 60 parents and set out to build a tool for managing savings goals and weekly allowance. But the founders deliberately resisted rushing into code. Influenced by the well-known startup principle of “Do Things that Don’t Scale”, they chose to teach in person first and see what families actually responded to.
That decision turned out to be the turning point. Through those live sessions, Fintr realised that an app was not necessarily the most engaging way to deliver the lessons. Instead, a physical game began to take shape — one that could make financial concepts feel less abstract and more memorable for children and parents alike.
Building a game, however, is a very different challenge from building software. Rall says the team approached the development process with the discipline of a tech company, testing changes every Friday with community members and then rebuilding the game by hand over the next week. In total, the product went through 27 iterations before the founders were happy with the final version.
How FinMaster became a South African board game success story
The game itself is built around a fictional currency called Finters and introduces players to financial concepts such as savings, retirement assets, property, stocks, businesses and alternative investments. It also uses event cards to reflect real-life shocks, including Covid-19, natural disasters and election outcomes. To give the game a local edge, Fintr added a set of distinctly South African “power cards” — among them a load-shedding card that causes a player to lose a turn, and a government tender card that sends players rolling for a payout.
That local flavour was not in the original design. Rall says early play-testers told the team the game was too soft and lacked tension. In true South African fashion, they wanted more conflict and more unpredictability. The founders listened. As Rall put it, testers essentially asked for more “vayolance” in the game — a reflection of how South Africans tend to prefer products that feel grounded in real life, not polished to the point of being bland.
The first commercial batch of 150 hand-built copies was a remarkable success. Sold in pizza boxes and signed by hand, the entire run sold out on the first day. One limited-edition handmade copy later fetched R7 000, highlighting how quickly the game developed cult status among early buyers and collectors.
Since then, production has moved through three distinct stages. First came manual assembly, then a second run with a local printer, and now larger-scale manufacturing through an overseas supplier. The transition was driven by economics as much as ambition. According to Rall, local quotes simply did not stack up at the retail price point the company needed to maintain.
That retail price is R800 online, and distribution has expanded from a few independent board game shops to a much broader footprint. The biggest boost, the founders say, came from getting Exclusive Books to stock the game nationally, giving FinMaster exposure across the country. A US retailer is also carrying the title, adding an international dimension to a product that remains proudly shaped by South African realities.
Fintr is now in discussions with financial institutions and schools, although Rall is careful to say these are not being pursued as simple resellers. Instead, the company sees them as channels to introduce more children to money education in a format that feels fun rather than forced. In a market where educators are constantly searching for better engagement tools, that could prove a meaningful advantage.
Digital is not disappearing from the picture entirely. In fact, Fintr is slowly reintroducing tech into the experience. An AI-powered rules assistant is already live for players who need help understanding the mechanics. The company is also working on an AI scoring calculator that would assess a player’s net worth from a photograph of their assets. A fully digital version of the game has also been requested, though it has not yet been built.
Rall believes that tension between digital convenience and physical connection is part of the game’s appeal. She says many people are tired of staring at screens all day, especially after work, and parents are increasingly uneasy about how much device time children already absorb. In that environment, a tactile product that gets families talking, negotiating and laughing together may have an edge.
That does not mean technology is going away. But it does suggest that the next wave of successful education products may be the ones that use tech selectively, not obsessively. Fintr’s experience shows that if a product solves a real problem and fits the emotional rhythm of its users, it can outperform the cleaner, more obvious digital answer.
For now, FinMaster stands as a strong example of South African entrepreneurship adapting to the market rather than forcing the market to adapt to the idea. What began as an app concept has become a nationally stocked board game, a conversation starter around money, and a reminder that sometimes the best tech-led business is the one that knows when to stay offline.