Fractal Labs: Enabling Your Business to Run Faster

Today, data has become the most valuable asset of every corporation and enterprise. But even in this digital age, companies tend to value their tangible, physical assets more than their data. Many do not realize that their data can significantly affect their balance sheet. Pretoria, South Africa-based Fractal Labs helps simplify raw data, enabling businesses to unlock insights for strategic development within their organization. It is enabling businesses to run faster, become streamlined, and overcome regulatory, financial, and fraud challenges. The company’s solutions have optimized credit scores for over 1.5m consumers across ten geographies, approving total loans over USD 200 million.

In an interesting conversation with us, Gunther Marais, a risk and data modeling pioneer and Fractal Labs founder, told us more about how the company is putting data at the center of business strategies. Read on for the excerpts from the interview.

What was the motivation behind establishing Fractal Labs, and where does it stand today?

When we started Fractal Labs in early 2020, we saw an opportunity to put data at the center of our clients’ and partners’ business strategies. All companies value their tangible, physical assets, but no one really values their data. We set out to change that. To ask companies, “How much is your data worth? What is the balance sheet value you can (and should) attribute to your data?”

Why should one choose Fractal Labs? What are the upsides?

Experience and understanding. We have a team with a broad array of technical skills and an advisory board of individuals with a massive amount of experience in transforming financial services businesses in emerging and underdeveloped markets. We don’t tout “out-of-the-box” solutions. We work with our clients to understand their needs and expectations – sometimes the simplest analysis or amendment to a process can bring about an immense return.

How will you help companies make smart business decisions?

We appreciate the benefits and challenges that complex legacy processes and large sets of data bring to a company. Drawing from a diverse set of skills, we are able to translate complex existing and new processes into simple narratives and visuals, enabling business leaders to make the right decisions in real-time based on real-time data. We see the act of data transformation as storytelling, and we look to provide our clients with a narrative that helps them realize measurable value.

How do your products and services help customers?

We span the entire customer journey be it for lending, banking, healthcare, or insurance. We have a range of core modules that assist in onboarding and sales optimization, risk management, and UX/customer experience. Our solutions are all source data agnostic and can be integrated with pretty much any client platform, making them easy to deploy.

How does Fractal Labs help its clients?

We look at this from two perspectives. Firstly our clients; we stand by our strapline: “The first coffee is on us.” We spend time with their businesses, understanding their challenges, and the opportunities they are trying to realize. From there, we look at the data to understand how we help them succeed.

For their customers (our other clients), we look to make the UX as seamless as possible and the experience as personalized as it can be. We are strong proponents of using data to drive hyper-personalization, to make each interaction special.

Where do you envision your company in a few years?

We’ve spoken about enhancing the balance sheet value of data for our clients. We see ourselves extending this to consumers, building traditional and non-traditional data sources into a consumer bureau solution, helping customers understand that their credit and consumer data is part of their personal balance sheet and should be curated as such.

The Leader

Gunther Marais, Founder and MD

He has 10 years of experience with risk and data modeling, in the financial and broader consulting sectors. With an MSc in Applied Mathematics, Gunther has worked with and led teams of highly skilled analysts to solve a wide range of problems for a multi-national client list across Africa. Before founding Fractal Labs, he was the Chief Risk Officer of MyBucks, a FinTech company based in Luxembourg. He has also been a Senior Quantitative Analyst at Nedbank.

“All companies value their tangible, physical assets but no one really values their data. We set out to change that.”