It’s inevitable that after working for 20 years in the banking sector, you can see numerous ways to improve it – which makes the opportunity to join a startup created with the explicit goal of redesigning banking from scratch a rare and wonderful thing. It’s also enormously scary, giving up a cushy, well-paid job in a stable business to venture into the unknown. Gita Daya laughs as she describes the conflicting emotions that gripped her when she was invited to join Bank Zero a few years ago.

She’d spent her whole career with FNB as a software engineer and then as the CIO of customer information systems, and was “feeling an itch to make a change” because it was becoming monotonous.