About

We build for one industry, which is why we knew where to look.

Bits & Algorithm is a South African technology company working exclusively in fiduciary, trust and estate administration. Not general enterprise automation with a financial services page bolted on the side.

The decision that shapes everything

Narrow on purpose

A general automation firm arriving in beneficiary fund administration would have optimised case allocation, because that is the step that looks slow on a process diagram.

We mapped it end to end and found the real cost sitting one step earlier, in working out whose case it was at all. That finding is only available to someone who has spent time in this specific work. It is not in a consulting framework.

The cost of being narrow is a smaller market. The benefit is that we arrive already knowing what a Section 13B administrator is, why a missing member reference matters, and what POPIA says about information concerning minors.

2018

Founded in Cape Town

Registration 2018/571829/07

B-BBEE 1

Level 1 contributor

Partner

Anthropic Claude Partner Network

With certified practitioners on the team

4

Technology estates we work across

OpenEdge, .NET, Java and Citrix

The team

Who you would be working with

Both founders spent years inside a large South African financial services group before starting this. That is the relevant fact. We are not technologists who read about fiduciary operations. We are the people who were doing the work, and who got tired of watching where the time went.

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Shaun Goniwe

Founder and Chief Executive Officer

More than a decade in enterprise technology, software delivery and infrastructure across South African financial services. Before founding B&A, Shaun held senior technology leadership roles at Sanlam, running release, configuration and deployment management across several enterprise platforms.

The work there ran across software engineering, quality assurance, operations, infrastructure and the business itself, which is an unusual combination and the reason he can talk to a bank's architecture review and its head of estates in the same afternoon.

Worth knowing

  • Assessed a proposed R20 million enterprise platform implementation, identified the architectural and operational risk in it, and prevented an estimated R15 million in losses. Saying no to a large project is harder than delivering one.
  • Cut deployment defects by roughly 35% through automated release and configuration management.
  • Reduced operational downtime by 40% through deployment governance and infrastructure work.
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Aldo Damon

Chief Operating Officer

Aldo runs operations, delivery and the process mapping that sits underneath every engagement. Seven years in business analysis and operational transformation across South African financial services and technology, most of it at Sanlam.

The finding this whole company is built on came out of that work. He spent long enough inside beneficiary fund and trust administration to notice that the expensive step was not the one everybody was trying to fix.

Worth knowing

  • Automated 75% of beneficiary fund and inter vivos trust operations covering more than R160 million in assets.
  • Cut annual operating costs by roughly R8 million through process automation.
  • Led a R4 million post merger migration between two large fiduciary businesses.
  • Reduced system downtime by 30% and improved processing speed by 25% on legacy platforms.

MCom and BCom Honours in Information Systems, University of Cape Town. BCom in Information Systems and Industrial Psychology, University of the Western Cape.

The rest of the team

Small on purpose at this stage, and weighted towards people who have built inside regulated environments rather than around them.

Lawrence Moti

Solutions Architect

Manelisi Nodada

Fiduciary Developer

Ignatius Chama

Fiduciary Developer

Gaspar Calanda

Infrastructure and Security

We are a small team and we will not pretend otherwise. If depth of bench matters to your risk assessment, raise it early and we will answer it straight.

Where we actually are

Stated plainly, because it will come up anyway

We are early. Pretending otherwise would not survive the first due diligence conversation, and it would undermine the one thing we are actually offering, which is honesty about measurement.

2018

Founded in Cape Town

Started by a group of information systems graduates, aimed from the beginning at financial services rather than at whoever would buy.

2019 to 2021

Three years of asking before building

Sustained conversations with fiduciary professionals about where the time actually goes in wills, trusts and estate work. Slow, and the reason we know which step to target.

2021 to 2023

Architecture designed

The workflow models and compliance framework underneath both platforms, drawn against real fiduciary processes rather than a generic automation template.

2024

AIaaP built and running

A working system that carries estate administration workflows end to end. It runs. It has not yet been deployed inside a paying client's production environment.

2025

Taken to the market to be tested

Direct engagement with several leading South African fiduciary institutions, which changed what we built. Engagement is not a signed contract and we will not describe it as one.

2026

Admitted to the SEDFA development programme

An independent assessment we did not run ourselves, which is worth more on a page like this than anything we could claim about ourselves.

Now

First Phase 0 engagements, and Fiducio to commercial release

No signed client engagement yet, and no production deployment. When there is, this page will say so before it says anything else.

Next

Pilot in a live environment

Running alongside an existing process on real correspondence, with a person approving every recommendation, and measuring the difference including the cases it gets wrong.

How we work with people

Empowerment, not replacement

This is the question every administrator asks when an automation firm walks in, and it deserves a direct answer rather than a reassuring one.

What changes

The minutes spent searching an inbox for a member reference. The rework when the same case is handled twice. The uncertainty about which case is closest to breaching its SLA.

What does not

Judgement calls. Complex cases. Difficult conversations with families. Every allocation still gets a person's approval before it is final.

The honest version

If a business wants to use this to cut headcount, it could. We would rather work with clients using it to handle more volume with the team they have, and we will say that in the room.

Get in touch

Client, partner, adviser or investor

We are interested in all four, and particularly in people who have run fiduciary operations and can tell us where we are wrong.

Contact us See how we work