Johannesburg 3 February 2026:// Cliqtech, a homegrown FidTech (Fiduciary Tech) company and now South Africa’s Leading Enterprise Digital-Will Provider has made huge inroads into the South African insurance and financial services sector since its inception in 2016.
Having identified a gap in the market, Cliqtech devised the idea to become South Africa’s first FidTech company in 2009. They established the business in 2016 and launched a first of its kind digital will solution, SmartWill, two years later.
“We identified a critical failure in the financial services sector (wills and estate planning). It was paper-heavy, costly, and largely inaccessible to the average South African. The vision we developed was to “democratise dignity” by using technology that ensured every South African, regardless of their social status, could easily access a legally sound will to protect their family’s wealth and legacy”, says Cliqtech CEO Zale Hechter.
Cliqtech began bootstrapping their own business venture by working lean and using personal savings in the startup phase of their journey until 2020. It was a time of intense focus where resources were scarce, but determination was high.
“We needed to face our “Field of Dreams” fallacy. We initially developed a business to business (BSB) system believing that if we build it, the corporates will come. They didn’t and we needed to survive the challenge of facing that rejection. So we decided to pivot and launch SmartWill directly to consumers (B2C) to prove the concept worked. After onboarding thousands of happy South African users the corporates started to pay attention”.
This sudden uptake in their SmartWill product was during the COVID-19 pandemic. What was a tragedy for so many also spurred on a digital awakening in South Africa where people realised the fragility of life (driving demand for wills) and the necessity of doing things online (driving demand for the SmartWill platform). SmartWill subsequently saw a massive spike in the demand for wills during lockdown moving from a nice-to-have to an essential service.
Due to this high demand for SmartWill, Cliqtech was able to leverage the user success and moved the needle from zero B2B interest to an impressive roster of blue-chip heavyweights.
“We have moved from chasing meetings to being the partner of choice for industry giants. A dream come true. Our client list now includes Metropolitan, 1Life, BetterSure, Discovery Life, Hollard, and Workerslife, to name but a few. We have built a robust team including developers, insurance and legal experts and client support agents. A defining moment for us was during the height of the pandemic—a time when most companies were retrenching—we hired 12 people in one day. That was a proud milestone, proving that tech can be a driver for job creation even in a time of crisis”.
Cliqtech’s position is now clear bridging complex legal compliance with seamless user experiences. They are the first FidTech specialist building secure, compliant, and scalable platforms that allow financial service providers to offer fiduciary products to their client base without the administrative nightmare. With their “white-label” solutions major insurers can seamlessly plug into their systems and create new revenue streams by offering much needed wills to their clients under their own brand.
“We combine deep legal expertise with agile tech stacks, a rare hybrid, and our reputation is growing as a global leader in FidTech. Our goal is to grow our footprint and offer our white-label services overborder into the African continent and other emerging markets where estate planning services are rare”.
Cliqtech is now protecting billions of rands in legacy for ordinary families and having a big social impact which Hechter says, is worth all the sleepless nights.
“We aren’t just selling code; we are solving a socio-economic crisis. When a breadwinner dies without a will, assets freeze, and families suffer. Every time our platform generates a will, we are potentially saving a family from financial ruin and it’s that purpose that fuels us”, concludes Hechter.