Getting heavy-handed on fintech community disruption with Heavy Chef Tours

Last week saw Primedia Cape Town hosting a special Valentine’s Day edition of Heavy Chef, with a strong focus on fintech. As proof of this, it featured two of SA’s hottest young entrepreneurs: Katlego Maphai, CEO of mobile payment system Yoco, and Andrew Watkins-Ball, CEO of JUMO, one of the continent’s fastest-growing startups.

Roed in action.

Now, Roed says the time has come to take this concept to scale, beyond our shores, with the launch of Heavy Chef Tours…

1. Let us in on Heavy Chef’s growth and success over the years.

Roed: Heavy Chef is a platform for 'people that do', focusing on leadership, tech and creativity. It began as a side project of the agency that I founded, World Wide Creative (WWC). It was a passion project that was borne out of a casual conversation with a client, around 2005 and comes from the phrase "I never trust a skinny chef". We started using the term "Heavy Chef" around the studio when motivating for new work. Soon after that, we decided to invite people that we admired, Heavy Chefs, to come and speak to our team about what they were doing. These talks ended up being really inspirational and outsiders started inviting themselves to attend – and then quickly grew to being the most popular regular digital-focused talks in the country. In the last two years, we have created the HC Magazine and now a TV show that’s set to launch mid-2017 via Primedia's channels. The community has grown to the extent that I actually decided to resign from WWC in December last year and give it a ‘full tonk’. The first initiative I'm launching as full-time CEO of Heavy Chef is the new "Tours" offering.

2. How did this first HeavyChef fintech London tour come about?

Roed: Until now, Heavy Chef have been bringing doers to our community. Last year, we asked the question: what if we bring the community to the doers?

The idea of Heavy Chef Tours quickly evolved out of that thought into our first product-offering out of the newly registered HC business. We plan to offer tours to the most interesting and inspiring hotspots around the world where there is an intense concentration of Heavy Chefs focused around one topic. There are so many fascinating sectors that are being disrupted – we want to get to the heart of these areas, and meet the people, the Heavy Chefs, that are driving the change.

3. What can potential attendees expect to learn?

Roed: For the first tour, we're leaving on 18 April and touring the Old Street area of London for three days. The FinTech tour is focusing on six themes: cryptocurrency, credit, insurance, transactions, access and security. We have organised some of the top FinTech startups in the world – companies like Transferwise, a money transfer company that allows you to save 90% of your fees through disrupting the status quo.

An image from the packed Valentine's Day version of Heavy Chef.

The tour is designed to give delegates a glimpse into the crystal ball of finance. We're heading into an era where currencies and the world of finance are going to be irreversibly and irrevocably changed. We believe this is an essential tour for anyone working in the financial services or related industries to attend.

We have negotiated with Dan Bowyer, a leading UK investor and facilitator, to run a workshop at the end of the three days. The workshop is designed to assimilate the learnings of the previous three days and internalise them into our own businesses. How can we change? How can we use these learnings in an African context?

4. Exciting times. Elaborate on other destinations we can look forward to down the line.

Roed: I'm planning two more this year, and currently negotiating with some of the top companies in the world on the topics of on-demand applications, security, media innovation, health, consciousness, education and environment. This is the most exciting time in the world to start a business, and there are some amazing hubs around the world right now, focusing on these themes. We want to visit them, speak to the thought leaders and glean content for our community back home.

Click here to view the gallery from HeavyChef’s Valentine’s Day fintech talk, here for more on the upcoming Tour, here for more on what’s really going on #BehindtheSelfie with Roed and here to keep up with Heavy Chef’s Twitter updates.