Dr Thomas Brennan, CEO and co-founder of Franc, explains how South African women are achieving stronger financial outcomes through disciplined, long-term investing, but at the same time, they lack financial confidence.

As someone who founded a digital wealth coach and investment platform, you’d think that my investment returns over many years would be above average. In fact, by actively managing my family’s finances, trying to time the market, and doing what I thought smart investors are supposed to do, I earned about 12.5% annually.

This is not above average. If I had simply put the money into an index-tracking ETF and left it alone, I would have earned 14%. I burned time, energy and ego for a worse outcome.

The strategy that would have beaten me is the one our data shows South African women are already using.

South Africa’s national Wealth Index, according to the inaugural Franc Wealth Index, a study of nearly 4,000 South Africans, is 45 out of 100. The score is built across three pillars: resilience (savings, debt, emergency preparedness), growth (investing, retirement planning, goal setting) and mindset (confidence and financial anxiety).

Women score 52. Men score 50. Strip out the structural advantages that have historically favoured men, including income and education and the gap doesn’t close. Women are outperforming men.

The statistical model tells an even starker story. Women in this dataset have 2.22 times the odds of achieving a higher Wealth Index than men.

Why women’s strategy works

What women are doing isn’t complicated. They set goals. They automate. They invest in diversified, low-cost products and leave them alone. They don’t try to time the market. That approach sounds boring, but it’s optimal.

The research on gender and investing has shown this pattern before: women tend to trade less, diversify more, and resist the overconfidence that leads men to churn portfolios and chase performance.

Men in our data are more likely to engage with investing, even at lower income levels. But getting started is only part of the equation. The data show that women who invest do so more consistently and automatically, without interference. Consistency and patience, not activity, are what compound over time.

I spent years at Discovery watching what happens when you measure something carefully and show it back to people. Behaviour changes. What our data shows about South African men (including me!) is that the financial strategy we often dismiss as passive or unambitious is measurably winning.

Women have higher financial anxiety

Here is where the story gets uncomfortable.

Women are doing more of the right things, but they still lack financial confidence. Our data shows that women carry significantly higher financial anxiety than men, even when their objective financial position is identical.

Men consistently report higher confidence and lower stress when holding the same levels of debt and savings as their female counterparts.

That matters beyond the emotional toll. Our data shows that it actively suppresses the very behaviours that build financial health.

Anxious people are measurably less likely to invest, review their financial goals, or seek help. The same women who are outperforming men today may, over time, be held back by the mental weight of worrying about it.

Invisible competence

Invisible competence is the condition of doing something well without receiving or internalising the signal that you are doing it well.

Our data shows that South African women are quietly and consistently executing sound financial strategies. What they often lack is not skill or discipline. It is the feedback loop that converts demonstrated competence into felt confidence.

This is part of why we built the Franc Wealth Index: to get a clear number that reflects actual financial behaviour.

When you show someone their own number, it becomes more than just a metric. For someone who’s not sure if they’re doing the right things, this type of data-driven recognition may be exactly what converts competence into the confidence that sustains it.

What we all – and I include myself – should be doing, is to stop talking and start copying. Not the anxiety or the lack of confidence, but the strategy: automate, diversify, stop trying to be clever, stay consistent.

The evidence is unambiguous. The patient, systematic approach that women in our dataset are more likely to follow outperforms the active, ego-involved approach that men are more likely to pursue.

The gap in financial outcomes in this country is not primarily a knowledge gap. Sixty-four percent of our respondents rate their investment knowledge as intermediate or above. The gap is behavioural. And the behaviour that works, that the data keeps indicating, looks a lot like what South African women are already doing.

The Franc Wealth Score is available at www.franc.app/tools/wealth-score. The full Franc Wealth Index Report is available at www.franc.app/learn/wealth-index-report.

This post was based on a press release issued on behalf of Franc.