From Living on $1/day to Venture Capitalist: A profile of Johan Bosini
Johan Bosini has always been a resourceful adventurer who follows his passions — and he has the stories to prove it. Moving from Italy where he was born (and where his Dad still lives on a farm) to South Africa when he was three, Bosini grew up among a family full of wanderlust and strong-willed women.
His family relocated to Cape Town when he was 12, during the apartheid era, where his parents sent him to one of the all-boys schools in the Western Cape. He graduated just as the apartheid regime was crumbling. “My first vote as a young adult was in the first free democratic election in South Africa post-apartheid,” he says. “And it felt good.”
After graduating from high school, he was inspired to travel with a friend and an old Fiat through 11 countries in Europe in nine months, even though the two had no money. They slept in the car on the side of the road or on beaches, stopping weekly at a hostel for a shower and a soft bed. “It sounds ridiculous now, but I think I spent a total of $200 over nine months of that trip,” he says. He survived on under $1 a day, often depending on the kindness of strangers and others who were equally curious about exploring the world. “It was truly one of the most amazing experiences you can imagine,” he says.
After college, a “victory lap” working in Colorado on a ski resort and some U.S. travel, Bosini took a job with Goldman Sachs in London, where he stayed for just under two years. Though officially an EU citizen, he longed for what had become home for him — South Africa — and was very attracted to the new world being born there. As Nelson Mandela came out of prison, forgave his trespassers, and re-imagined a new rainbow nation, a technology revolution was also underway. South Africa was an early adopter of the internet (Amazon Web services was developed in Cape Town), and in 2001, following the events of September 11 in the United States, Bosini returned to South Africa to join a growth-oriented tech company called ForwardSlash, which became one of the leading online marketing companies in its category. Another motivation for his return? To settle down a little to get married to his high school sweetheart, Angela.
Having found both his personal and professional passions upon his return to South Africa, Bosini founded his own tech company with friends called Imali, the first financial services online affiliate network focused on South Africa. A year later, he joined some former colleagues to found an online marketing company. Two years later he pivoted towards financial services, first joining ReMark, a global insurance marketing firm, and then RCS, a leading consumer finance company in South Africa, where he set up an insurance business and ran several departments, including marketing, operations and business development.
Later, Bosini was one of the founders of a business that focused on selling insurance in emerging markets through partnerships — inspired in part by innovators in South Africa like Hollard and Discovery, who put the country on the forefront for innovation in insurance globally. In his early work, he found that the policies sold to low-income families in South Africa were incredibly costly for limited coverage, with most of the money going not to the policy benefits, but to the commission, marketing and distribution costs, monthly policy administration and other fees. “A single mother in South Africa might have been paying $7–8 per month for a policy that would pay out just $1,000 for her funeral upon her death,” he says. “She would effectively be paying a large percentage of her monthly salary for something that others could obtain for a fraction of the price.” He realized that the financial system wasn’t geared toward building products that serve the bottom of the pyramid, and that it was more expensive to be poor than he had ever imagined.
A few years later Bosini launched the first mobile-only unsecured lending product in East Africa with JUMO. His work with JUMO took him across the continent — negotiating relationships with telcos from Nairobi to Accra — to help find a cost-effective and convenient way to deliver financial services products that also added value for their mobile network partner. “Microcredit and insurance is really hard to do in a sustainable and profitable way,” he says. “The customer acquisition cost is often more than the value of the product that people need or can afford. It was incredible connecting with mobile networks as partners to explore how we could get customers in a cost-efficient manner, with products that were really meaningful and had been out of their reach through traditional channels. What stuck with me was how our ability to work through mobile operators was all about relationships, not just contracts and service level agreements.”
These individual experiences with the deficits in both banking and insurance led Bosini to want to do more to help the unbanked, more to impact financial inclusion. Eventually, he found his way to Quona Capital, where today he is a partner.
But why venture capital, for someone who knows his way around entrepreneurship?
“When I was thinking about joining Quona, [Quona partner] Ganesh Rengaswamy said something along the lines of, ‘you can go the startup route again, or you can join Quona, where you get to support and be involved with a whole bunch of incredible entrepreneurs who are looking to change the world of financial services across the globe, rather than focus on only one.’ That really made sense to me.”
Quona has brought Bosini the opportunity to explore different facets of financial services across Latin America, Africa and Asia, and see up close which ones have the most potential to drive change. “Right now I’m most excited about embedded finance, which I think is a growing theme across the globe. Logistics, last-mile delivery and mobility are some of those categories that are really complicated in Africa, but when solved, embedded financial services can make a really big difference in the daily lives of this continent’s amazing people,” he says. “Adding credit or insurance into a person’s daily life, like when they order stock for their small business, can have an extraordinary impact on a community.”
And he’s still the resourceful adventurer, connecting people and ideas to push innovative ideas, impact and inspiration forward.
“There are still people who think that some emerging markets are begging bowls, scary, risky, et cetera,” Bosini says. “While in actual fact, when you spend more time in emerging markets, you realize how they are filled with really smart, very impressive people who have gotten to where they are by being driven, committed, persevering no matter what, despite the challenges they face…and that there’s a lot more to be excited about than there is to be worried about.”
