Meet the Grade 10 pupil who built a financial literacy tool

Grade 10 pupil Ronan Vaz has launched an open access financial literacy platform to give fellow high school pupils a head start on managing their money.

Vaz is a pupil at Woodlands International College and he has made use of his skills in IT and web design to build Finnclu, a website that aims to share information about investing, stocks, bonds, and assets – at no cost to the user.

Vaz’s goal is to help others help themselves by breaking down the barriers of access to vital information on how to successfully invest.

“Knowledge on investing and asset management is quite limited amongst young people, we only learn about investing in Grade 12 business studies.

“I’ve been privileged to have access to information about financial literacy and wanted to create a platform where I could share my passion.

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“Many people can benefit from creating passive income streams, they just need to know where to start – Finnclu has created a space for this,” says Vaz.

Vaz built Finnclu with the help of his team of six, and the website offers monthly educational videos, webinars, financial literacy books that are accessible both online and offline, insight into investing algorithms and links to resources that Vaz personally uses to track his investment portfolio.

The grade 10 pupil plans to study mechanical engineering after high school at a top-ranked international university, such as the University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge or Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

He has an interest in robotics, and is a part of the Molo Africa team who assembled a plane that flew from Cape Town to Cairo in 2019.

Rebecca Pretorius, country manager at Crimson Education, said top-ranked universities were looking for students who showed leadership, innovation and a passion for change in their communities, and these are the characteristics which Vaz possesses.

“Vaz is the perfect example of the benefits of starting early to work incrementally, plan ahead, and build out the right activities and projects that show depth, instead of cramming these in the last year or two of school. This is vital in more competitive majors like engineering, computer science, medicine, and finance” said Pretorius.