EasyEquities still owns retail mindshare — by a wide margin. The ~1.9m investor base, the product breadth (crypto, property, retirement, bundles), and the educational moat are real. But the moat is no longer technological. It's emotional and habitual. Power users are visibly cooling on the platform: Thrive, the FSR debate, support latency, and EasyFX pricing that independent reviewers estimate at 1–2% all-in are all draining the goodwill that the brand has historically traded on.
Clarity is the most strategically interesting of the three. It is not a profitability play. It's an option — Investec buying a seat at the table of self-directed investing before Standard Bank and Capitec lock down the bank-integrated category. The CFD-only structure is a clean engineering choice that lets them launch with zero commissions and 25-second FX, but it caps the addressable market: serious long-term investors will not hold their retirement in synthetic exposure. Expect Clarity to either expand its wrapper set (TFSA, RA via direct equity) or stay deliberately narrow as a wealth-funnel.
Shyft is the quiet structural threat. Standard Bank is doing the boring, expensive work that fintechs cannot replicate: consolidating OST, WebTrader and ASI into one consumer app, anchored by the country's strongest forex business and a real multi-currency cards product. If Shyft delivers on the 2026 consolidation — and crucially, if it builds a credible TFIA and recurring-invest layer — it becomes the only platform in the country that can match Revolut/Wise on FX and offer regulated investing inside the same app. That is a category EasyEquities cannot reach.
The next 12–24 months hinge on a single question: does breadth (EasyEquities) or banking depth (Shyft) win the SA mass market? Clarity, sensibly, is hedging — competing on neither, and instead defending Investec's existing relationships from being unbundled by either side.