The electrical engineer by training, and now Merchant Capital’s CTO, has always loved problem-solving and has taken that innate quality with him from one discipline to the next.
A humble man of faith, David Reynders blushes down to his boots when talking about his accomplishments. However, David's accolades over the years are testament to his diverse skills and capabilities.
With a career spanning over two decades, his journey is marked by a relentless pursuit of excellence, pioneering groundbreaking solutions, and shaping the landscape of the ICT industry. As CTO and CIO of alternative lender Merchant Capital since November 2015, he has spearheaded the evolution of the organisation into a scalable, cost-effective, system-driven operation.
David’s leadership has been characterised by his belief that people and machines ‘do different things’. He explains that functions can be divided into those that humans are good at and those that computers are good at. “My job as CTO is to identify all of the processes that computers are good at and leave it to them, which then frees our people up to flourish as they focus on what they excel at.”
The son of an electrical engineer, and himself a qualified electrical engineer, David says his education cultivated a love of solving problems. “Studying engineering is essentially a four-year period of learning how to problem solve,” he says. The fact that his father was one of his lecturers probably led him to study harder than the rest of the class, he jokes.
After completing his master’s degree, he entered the working world at Megawatt Park. His bursary funder, Eskom, provided him with employment, but unfortunately, no inspiration. “The experience was quite disappointing. There were no new cool problems to solve and I feel that the organisation missed opportunities by not throwing complex problems at their graduate employees. We love that kind of stuff!”
Turning the experience into a lesson on culture, he moved over to Internet Solutions: “If you take options off the table, it actually teaches you how to make better decisions,” he explains. Then still a fledgling company, IS was so keen to get his talents on board that they bought him out of his bursary to enable the move.
At the time, despite corporates employing any number of engineers, new ideas in the field were slow to filter down. Not so in the internet space, though, and David relished the challenges that came his way.
His first gig at IS was a project that sought to connect businesses with the healthcare industry in order to facilitate easier transactions. As the company and project grew, he was tasked with building a technology team. “I had never interviewed anyone before,” he laughs. “I offered the first person I hired twice as much as I was earning.”
Needless to say, the team members were happy, the team grew, and the project was a success. The solution still exists and is used to this day.
A significant pitstop between IS and Merchant Capital, the TradeBridge group offered David a founding role as managing director of POCiT, a mobile payments platform and start-up division of the group. Under his leadership, POCiT witnessed exponential growth, launching one of South Africa’s first mobile payment services and garnering widespread recognition for innovation.
David’s leadership in the HealthBridge business unit saw him negotiate and launch South Africa's first non-bank card acquiring solution, SureSwipe, and run at the forefront of the development of revolutionary healthcare technology solutions. His commitment to innovation and excellence earned him the National Science and Technology Forum (NSTF Award) for Innovation in 2010.
David’s deep knowledge of healthcare stood him in good stead at Merchant Capital, where he fronted the development and launch of a fully-automated digital lending system that supported the needs of medical service providers who needed working capital to get through the Covid lockdowns – a solution that was brought to market in under eight weeks from ideation. His stewardship has since grown this system into a major offering for tens of thousands of SMEs across a multitude of industries.
On a personal note, David is a proud Joburger. He considers himself a head-office kind of guy and, for him, Joburg is the head office of South Africa, if not the entire continent.
He will, however, leave Joburg’s urban sprawl to have mountain bike adventures. “My wife has finally figured out that I’m a much better husband, and less grumpy overall, once I’ve been out on my bike.”
He is a husband, father, pastor, and problem solver. All of these labels are accurate, but over and above them, he defines himself by his motivation to get out there and ‘seize the day’ – a lesson from Dead Poets Society, which he watched as a child and which still influences him today.
