Est. September 1998 · Johannesburg
In September 1998 a small team in Johannesburg started building online shops for retailers who were not yet sure the internet would stick. Twenty-eight years later that business runs customer experience, connectivity, marketing, security and data for some of the biggest brands on the continent. This is the long version of how that happened.
A short note first
Twenty-eight years is long enough that most of the technology we started on no longer exists, and long enough that some of the people we started with are still here.
Anniversaries usually get the highlight reel. We wanted to do something slightly different, because the interesting part of a long run is not the wins. It is the through-line. The same handful of instincts show up in the 1999 online catalogue, the 2003 election IVR, the 2007 Nando’s voucher and the fibre voucher somebody bought this morning for five rand.
Build the thing customers actually need rather than the thing that demos well. Take the operational job nobody else wants, because that is where the trust gets made. Stay long enough to see it work. And where you can, make the commercial outcome and the human one point in the same direction.
What follows is the honest version. Dates, numbers and the things that went into production. Scroll on.
Twenty-eight years is a long time to keep at something, and nobody manages it by being grim about it. Serious fun is a real thing here. Somebody trademarked it on their palm in an old brand deck and it is still the closest we have to a house rule. Take the work seriously, take the deadline seriously, take the client's problem very seriously indeed. Do not take yourself seriously while you are doing it. Most of what follows was built by people enjoying themselves.
The founding idea was simple. Retailers wanted a new channel to sell through and had no way to build one, so we built it for them and ran it as a service. An application service provider, before anybody used that phrase in a South African boardroom. It was unusual in 1998, when most people were still arguing about whether anyone would type a card number into a browser.
Award
Best eCommerce Enabler
digitalmall.com
Registered on 14 January 1999. This is the entity that became CXG. It started as the human layer behind the online shops, because somebody had to answer when the order did not arrive, and it is now the largest business in the group.
Founded 1999The brand behind the brand. Customer-obsessed CX, on demand.
On-demand capacity
120 trained agents inside a nine-day billing window, then back down again. Very few operators can flex like that.
Eleven languages
All eleven official South African languages, plus transcription across twenty-four European ones.
Independently accredited
GBPO Solutions member since October 2025. People practices, processes and technology validated by somebody else.
Learn and earn
Three students educated for every seat a client outsources, through the Maharishi Institute joint venture.
A wedding, run online, in 1999. Gift registry, guest list, the lot, on a South African internet that most people still reached through a modem. It reads like a novelty and it was not: it was a working proof that people would transact online for something they cared about, which was the whole argument digitalmall was making to retailers at the time. The idea had legs, too. It was still going years later as Digi-Wedding.net, by then doing custom wedding sites, e-stationery and event management.
The start of the longest client relationship in the group, and it is still going. What began as integrated customer experience in 1999 became an M-Voucher in 2007, the ordering centre in 2018, and an EMEA CX award in 2024. Twenty-seven years with one brand.
Award
Best Online Grocery Store
Click & Pay, the online grocery store digitalmall built and ran
A year and a bit old, and good enough for a mobile content company to buy a controlling stake ahead of its own IPO. iTouch delivered mobile content and was owned by Independent News and Media at the time. They wanted into mobile commerce, we wanted to get out of one country, so the deal suited both sides. iTouch listed on the London Stock Exchange the following June and raised £42.5 million for twenty percent of the group.
Vodacom's WAP gateway went live that month, running at 9.6 kbps on screens four lines tall. Our software sat behind the first commercial transaction over it, which made it South Africa's first mobile commerce transaction. It happened on Radio 5, on the Doctoza campaign for Accenture, which is a very ordinary place for a first to happen. Seven years before the iPhone existed. The same thinking shipped into the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Israel soon after.
In the press
Eighteen months old and rebuilding the whole storefront on Microsoft Site Server Commerce Edition, with WAP purchasing wired in, to carry fifteen to twenty thousand concurrent shoppers at peak. Thirty-two people in the customer interaction centre behind it. Incredible Connection, Look & Listen, Click & Pay, Nando's and Virtual Florist were trading on it, with Toys R Us and Reggies to come. Microsoft's own technology strategist called it a hot dot, which was the highest compliment available in 2000.
Someone tried to defraud one of our merchants. We tracked it, worked with the banks and the police, and it became the country's first successful internet credit card fraud arrest and prosecution. A second syndicate bust followed in May 2001, with Nedcor, Standard Bank and the SAPS.
Award
Best Online Mall & Retail Site
digitalmall.com
The first eBucks transaction ever went through digitalmall.com. So did the first Blue Bean transaction, and the first e-commerce transaction for Nedbank online. New ways to pay got tested here first, which is what tends to happen when you are the storefront everyone else is plugging into. Traffic we went and found rather than waited for: an affiliate programme put our commerce inside the high-traffic content sites of the day, iafrica.com Digital Mall, MSN Shopping, World Online Digital Mall and IOL Shopping. Makro, Incredible Connection, Toys R Us, Wordsworth Books and Netcare Pharmacies were all selling through it.
Hannah was digitalmall's virtual shopping assistant, a character with a face and a name who helped people find their way around the store. She won Online Personality of the Year in 2001, which is a peculiar and rather lovely thing for a piece of software to win. Siri was still ten years off.
digitalmall.tv was the television arm, the T-commerce channel, and it was never meant to stand on its own. It sat alongside eight others feeding a single commerce engine: the web, mobile and WAP, telephone and fax, Hypercom speedpoint terminals, automated voice over Voice XML, PDAs and Palms, printed catalogues, and self-service kiosks in stores. One basket behind all of them, one customer record, one delivery network, three bank gateways. The word omnichannel was still about a decade from common use.
The dot-com crash took the air out of everything. First to market and a successful listing counted for nothing once the share price went. Management bought the iTouch stake back, refocused the business on Africa, and it became Digital Solutions Group. Twenty-five years on it is still founder-led and still privately held, which in this industry is rarer than it sounds. The poster is worth reading closely, because the argument on it has not really changed: the customer in the middle, then the channels they might arrive through, then the people, technology, process and management behind those, and quality assurance wrapped round the lot. Thirteen brands along the bottom, one switchboard number, and a promise to be reachable anywhere and any way.
Award
Best Use of Technology, Contact Centre
Age of Innovation finalist
It started in 2001 with a multi-channel commerce solution, and South Africa's first mobile ticketing inside it. The website went straight into the cinema's inventory, so you picked your actual seat and had it confirmed then and there, instead of sending a request and waiting to hear. Ferdi Gazendam was running Ster-Kinekor at the time. He is DSG's chairman now, which tells you something about how these relationships tend to go. Then the harder problem. Ster-Kinekor's difficulty was that most people phoning a cinema do not want to buy anything. Sixty-two percent of calls were asking what was on and when, against an average basket of R56, so a human answering them lost money on every call. We built the answer on VoiceGenie VoiceXML, which had never been deployed in South Africa before, and pointed it at the same web application we had already built them, so the voice service and the website read from one source. Speech recognition rather than press-one-for, because forty cinemas times twenty titles is not a menu anyone can sit through. Six weeks to build against a three month estimate.
First internet retail development company in the country to integrate SAP into an e-business retail solution. Over 5,000 products, and we ran Makro's telesales, internet store and national customer care alongside it. A three-way alliance with eBucks let shoppers spend reward points on real goods, and putting the contact centre inside the fulfilment decision, choosing the delivery option rather than defaulting to one, cut the monthly delivery bill by seventy-five percent. The human on the end of the phone was the point: it is what rescued the baskets that would otherwise have been abandoned at a failed payment.
Award
Age of Innovation Award
A small illustration of what a contact centre is actually for. Complaints coming into the Nando's centre between June and November 2002 kept pointing at one menu item. We fed that back, the operational procedure behind it changed, and by December complaints on the Quarter Chicken were down twenty-five percent. Presented at the brand strategy meeting in March 2003, which is the part that matters: the call centre had become a source of operating intelligence rather than a place where unhappiness went to be logged.
An election is the one deadline nobody can move. The Independent Electoral Commission awarded the contract on 28 September 2003 to a consortium of Digital Mall, Grintek Telecom and Emmanuel's Staffing Services. It needed a multi-channel platform across all eleven official languages, and it needed it now. Six ways in: ATM, IVR, SMS, web, email and the contact centre. The ATM is the one people blink at, and in 2003 it was the machine most South Africans could actually reach. We wrote a Voice XML IVR with more than 20,000 prompts and had the full platform live in three days, then recruited and trained over a hundred agents to run it. What started as a business-hours public service became fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, averaging twelve thousand calls a day, and the IEC went on to invest in a 120-port VoiceXML platform behind a 110-seat centre. Around four hundred people were trained on it in the end. South Africa's first m-government deployment, and still the most impressive operational thing the company has ever done.
In the press
We partnered with Palm South Africa and built a shopping application into the handheld itself, on the SDK card of the Tungsten W, so it sat in the menu the way Intel Inside sat on a laptop lid. Written in PQA, Palm's own query language, and deliberately tiny: it browsed offline and only reached the network to check stock or take payment, because GPRS billed by the packet and a chatty app would have cost more than the shopping. Card details were pre-registered on the website and never travelled over the mobile network. First of its kind in South Africa, and as far as anyone could establish, anywhere.
Award
IEC Contact Centre Award
Phumelela's TAB customers could place a bet on horseracing or soccer from a Pocket PC or a phone, and it was the first licensed online gambling application in South Africa. Stylus driven and deliberately device agnostic, so it ran on Symbian, Palm OS and Windows CE, over SMS, WAP, GPRS and Bluetooth. Getting it live meant clearing SABS and the Gauteng Gambling Board, which is a slower kind of engineering than writing the thing. It took Best B2C m-commerce Application at the Vodacom Mobile Connect awards that year, went on to qualify for the Technology Top 100 in its own right, and the Department of Science and Technology singled it out alongside the group's business model.
The first financial mobile application in South Africa, built for TransUnion Mead & McGrouther. The Car Dealer Guide is the bible of the motor trade, and its problem was structural: vehicle values move, print does not, so the book was out of date the day it arrived. We put it on a handset, where it could be current, and added the thing a dealer actually needs next to a valuation, a finance calculator to work out the repayment. It was also the first e-book on mobile. It won a Mobile WASP Award and started a TransUnion relationship that ran another decade.
Award
Mobile WASP Award
TransUnion Car Dealer Guide
Award
Public Sector Innovation Award
With the IEC
The appointment that everything after it hangs on. The Foundation confirmed Yaron as its ICT strategist in August 2004, and Digital Mall agreed to sponsor it with a content management system and an e-commerce site. Eight years of advising followed, and out of it came the 46664 work: the strategy for the global communities programme, the text-to-screen system on the short code, and South Africa's first SMS donation platform.
We were technology partner for the Mandela AIDS benefit concerts. At Fancourt, a message texted to 46664 went up on the screen beside the stage and out over the television broadcast, which is a small piece of engineering that turns an audience into participants. Over twenty-five thousand messages during the concert itself, more than thirty-seven thousand across the campaign week, and the results running live on nelsonmandela.org as they came in. The SMS facility raised more than R780,000 at that concert, and the donation platform behind it, the first in South Africa, went past R2 million. We ran the 0800 046664 contact centre and the webcast alongside it. Malaria picks the thread up again in 2010. The Madiba Way is still one of the group's values and this is where it comes from.
Award
Technology Top 100
Award
COJ Innovation Award
City of Johannesburg
The public contact centre for the Debt Relief Programme, and in 2008 the two portals behind it: Debt Manager for the regulator and Debt Help for accredited debt counsellors, with the workflow joining them up. It won an iGovernment Award in 2008 with TransUnion ITC. Unglamorous work, and it kept people in their homes.
Two years after the general-election platform, the IEC came back for the municipal registration drive. A hundred and eighty staff, up to eighty operators a shift, the VoiceXML IVR again, and around a million calls expected on 0800 11 8000. Assabi at the time: it is a great opportunity to create jobs and serve our country at the same time.
In the press
A full design, build, operate and transfer job. Contact centre, network operations centre, data centre and retail, all of it, handed over working. An Asterisk contact centre with SS7 integration into a Nokia IP switch. This is where the telecoms enablement business actually started, seven years before MVNE existed on paper.
Award
PMR Service Excellence
Award
Technology Top 100
We were doing e-business strategy for Telesure and came up with Hippo, a place where you put your details in once and see what every insurer would charge you. South Africa's first insurance aggregator. Obvious now, and not obvious then: the industry was built on the assumption that you phoned around yourself, or a broker did it for you and kept the difference. Hippo is a big part of Telesure today and quotes well beyond the Telesure stable. The same shareholders went on to launch Compare the Market in the UK and in Australia, which has carried valuations between £2.2 billion and £4.5 billion.
The first mobile voucher for a quick service restaurant in South Africa. Over 25,000 redeemed and more than R1 million in additional revenue. It won an Assegai Award, and the SMS follow-up won Best Customer Experience the year after. Nando's has been a client since 1999, which makes this an eighteen-year-old idea inside a relationship that is older still.
Conceived and proved in 2006 for Investec's private clients, live the year after. Your own portfolio running across your phone as a ticker, the way CNN runs one across the bottom of the screen. Not the whole market, just your shares. And if something moved and you wanted to act on it, you tapped the share and you were inside your account, ready to trade. That last part is the bit people forget: plenty of things could show you a price in 2007, but going from watching to trading in one tap, on a handset of that era, was a different problem.
Award
Gold, Service Excellence
Award
MMA Mobile Marketing Award
Award
Best Customer Experience
Nando’s SMS follow-up
Award
Best WASP Customer Service
Award
Technical Innovation
Award
iGovernment Award
With TransUnion ITC, National Credit Regulator
A CDMA operator in Dar es Salaam, built on the same design-build-operate-transfer thinking as Cell One two years earlier. Second network, second country, and by now a repeatable way of doing it.
Uganda's first WIMAX operator, and the third national network the group had a hand in inside four years. The Exporter of the Year award arrived the same year, which is what happens when three of your last four builds were somebody else's country.
The 2010 World Cup put two billion pairs of eyes on South Africa, and United Against Malaria used the tournament to turn football's reach into malaria funding. We built the e-commerce fundraising platforms behind it, for United Against Malaria and for Goodbye Malaria, and the mobile learning initiative that ran across Africa in seven languages. That last part ran with MTN and it is the screen worth looking at: an info package and a quiz, on a phone with a numeric keypad, in the hands of people who would never see a malaria pamphlet. The campaign got carried by people rather than media budgets: Nando's sold bracelets across its restaurants, and MultiChoice and Standard Bank took it to their own staff right across Africa. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was partner on it and came out for the tournament. The same short-code and donations thinking that started with 46664 five years earlier, pointed at a different disease.
Engineering News profiled Yaron Assabi and the group the same year DSG was named Exporter of the Year. It is the earliest substantial press profile of the business anywhere.
Award
Exporter of the Year
Award
Innovation Finalist
Appointed mobile partner to Discovery, and the work that came out of it was the Discovery Insure mobile apps. Insurance is one of the harder things to put on a phone, because the moment a customer needs you is usually the worst moment of their week, and it turns into an mHealth thread the group is still pulling on.
Award
Partner Award
Credit application smart forms for Diamond Bank in Nigeria and Kashfin here, plus m-commerce applications and app stores for mobile operators around the region. Not glamorous and worth noting anyway: it is the year the work stopped being only South African, and the app-store builds for operators are the direct ancestor of what MVNE does now.
Mobile marketing and advertising for networks, publishers, developers and brands. It went quiet for a while and came back properly in 2025 as a publisher-first ad network, which is a longer story with better timing.
Founded 2012We make digital work harder. Human craftsmanship, amplified by AI.
Publisher-first
Relaunched in May 2025 as an ad network aggregating vetted South African publishers, including vernacular and regional outlets.
Creative at volume
1,200 ad variations across three brand stories from one creative system, optimised continuously on click-through.
It wins things
Silver in Programmatic at the MMA SMARTIES South Africa 2025 awards, for Jungle Oats.
It owns the platforms
Xanite, Persaic, Fluent and AgentSpace are all built and operated here.
Set up at the start of 2013 to help large consumer brands take real ownership of the mobile telecoms value chain, rather than renting a logo on somebody else's SIM. It is now one of the two engines of the group.
Founded 2013White-glove MVNO enablement for African brands. We run the full mobile value chain so you can own the customer.
Under 60 days to launch
On the Digital Mobile white label. No network to build, no internal telecoms team to hire.
Not a box
Turnkey operations, billing and CRM, revenue assurance and fraud, omnichannel care, logistics and SIM distribution, customer value management.
Built networks first
Cell One Namibia in 2006 on a full design-build-operate-transfer, Sasatel in Tanzania in 2008, Uganda's first WIMAX operator in 2009. MVNE was the productisation of that.
A global consortium
With Jersey Telecom, MDS Global and Ycorp since MWC Barcelona 2026, reaching the UK, Europe and the UAE.
The group marked fifteen years the way it marks most things, by making something. Worth watching now mostly for what it did not yet know: MVNE was months old, there was no cyber business, no ad network, and DStv Internet was eight years away.
Award
Mobile App of the Year
MMA SMARTIES South Africa, Silver for TransUnion 1Check and Bronze for the PPC Builder's App. Both credited to Digital Solutions Group. PPC, for the record, is Pretoria Portland Cement, and the app was for people who build things out of concrete.
In the press
A long run of ITWeb columns on ad-blocking, martech, customer loyalty, business apps and the new C-suite. Unglamorous, and it is the reason the group was a known quantity to the trade press long before the current portfolio existed.
In the press
Starbucks brought its rewards programme to South Africa and DSG built the single customer view behind it. Both ITWeb and IT-Online covered it at the time.
Broadbrand took exclusive rights to InMobi's ad inventory across Africa, with Assabi named as its founder and CEO. This is the clearest public evidence that Broadbrand was trading years before its 2025 relaunch.
Award
BPESA Regional & National Contact Centre Winner
MTN App of the Year, and the most profitable app of the year with it. The whole idea was that you point a camera at a thing instead of typing about the thing. Simplicity drives adoption, and that one sentence runs directly into MiWay Blink five years later and into DStv Internet self-service today.
Award
New Generation Awards, Best App Developed by an Agency
TransUnion 1Check. Yaron Assabi accepted it with TransUnion's Kriben Reddy at the fourth New Generation Social & Digital Media Awards in Johannesburg.
We had run a 100-seat contact centre in Rosebank for over fifteen years. The joint venture added 250 seats at the Maharishi Institute's Johannesburg CBD campus and built in Black Economic Empowerment provisions. Students earn while they study for distance-education degrees. For every seat a client outsources to us, three students get educated, and the target has always been a thousand. That is still the arrangement, and it is how the Nando's ordering centre is staffed. DSG has always meant more than one thing at once, Digital Solutions Group and Doing Something Great, and this is the reason that is not a slogan: the commercial model and the social one are the same model.
Award
BPESA Industry Awards, National Winner
Rewarding Achievement
Award
CCMG Best Outsourced Partnership, Winner
Award
BPESA Best Outsourced & Best Use of Social Media
MVNE took New Age Partner of the Year at MTN Business's first Partner Awards, in Johannesburg. “We hadn't expected this,” said MVNE chief executive Zak van de Merwe, “and are very honoured and humbled that MTN Business chose to recognise us for an award as prestigious as this.” An MVNO only works if the host network and the enabler are genuinely close, and that closeness is what the award was for.
A partnership with Norwegian telecoms software house Gintel to take B2B voice services to operators.
In the press
BPESA and CCMG Awards. First for Best Technology Innovation, first for Best Use of Social Media in a Contact Centre, and second for Best Outsourced Contact Centre in the medium category. Three in one evening, which is not something that happens twice.
Award
CCMG Industry Awards, 1st place
Best Use of Social Media in the Contact Centre
Award
CCMG Industry Awards, 1st place
Best Technology Innovation
Award
BPESA, 2nd place
Best Outsourced Contact Centre, medium category
We started with early triage during Vuma's growth period and ended up running national 24/7/365 support for over a million subscribers across seventy-five internet service providers, plus Fibrehoods onboarding. Two million homes connected. The hard part was scaling the operating model without letting response times slide, which is the part nobody puts on a slide.
Nando's had been a client for nineteen years when we took on the ordering centre, and that is when the shape of it changed. Every restaurant phone number in the country is now ported into a centrally managed SIP service, fully integrated into the Nando's stack, covering e-commerce, mobile app and voice ordering across South Africa and IMEA. Over R2 billion in revenue delivered, three hundred-plus restaurants, 98% of calls answered and ninety percent of those inside twenty seconds. The contact centre costs Nando's under four percent of the sales it generates.
“Customer experiences are no longer an isolated piece of our business but part of a larger engagement strategy. DSG supports experiences that future-shock-proof our business, whilst changing lives.”
We had been dealing with the security side of other people's platforms for twenty years. In 2018 we gave it its own company and called it Digital Resilience, because the threat landscape never stops moving and neither can you. Eleven global platform partnerships now sit behind it.
Founded 2018South Africa's cyber resilience partner. Global-grade security, delivered locally by a team that answers to your business.
Resilience, not just prevention
The founding line still holds: preventing every intrusion is too ambitious a goal, so build to stay standing under attack instead.
Micro, meso, macro
Endpoint and human-layer risk, then organisation-wide detection, response and testing, then governance and board-level reporting.
Eleven global platforms
Bitdefender, Securonix, Tenable, Trellix, Xcitium, Black Kite, OutThink, Beauceron and more, integrated and managed as one.
Paired with cover
eInsurer sits alongside it, so prevention and insurance come from the same place rather than two vendors pointing at each other.
Billing periods create a wall of contacts for a week and then nothing. We trained 120 billing chat agents and flexed them day by day across a seven to nine day window, every month. Zero operational disruption, CSAT protected through the worst of it. It is the clearest demonstration of what on-demand CX actually means.
Finalist for Most Innovative App Developed by an Agency, for TransUnion 1Check and FirstCheck, alongside a CCMG Best Domestic Outsourced Contact Centre finalist place the same year.
Award
BPESA GBS Awards, Winner
Top Support Services Provider Award
Award
Engage Awards, Finalist
Best Outsourced Partnership. Westminster Park Plaza, London
Behaviour-based motor insurance from a phone, built with MiWay and Zendrive. Comprehensive cover, claims and monthly cashbacks, with crash detection that dispatches emergency services on your behalf. Nobody here had built one before, and it is a direct descendant of 1Check: the phone does the work, the customer does almost nothing.
In the press
A SIM, a router and a way to watch without the data bill eating you alive. MVNE combined content and connectivity to solve the cost problem, and CXG runs the care layer for the same account. In the financial year to March 2025 it accounted for around nine percent of MTN's MVNO platform data traffic, with subscribers up 45% and revenue up 85%. One group owning enablement, billing, care and marketing for the same service is genuinely hard to copy, and this is the clearest example of it working.
In the press
“I often have to remind myself that this is our product and not yours, given the ownership your team has demonstrated. MVNE has been our safety net each time, never missing a beat.”
The Financial Mail ran Assabi in its BACKSTORY slot, which is the closest thing to a long-form profile of the founder anywhere in the South African business press.
Twenty-three years after it started as an online mall, DigitalMall was still shipping: a joint crackdown on SMS spam with WMC Global.
Award
Contact Center World, Gold Winner
Best Outsourcing Partnership, 2021 global top ranking
Award
Contact Center World, Silver Winner
Best Outsourcing Partnership, 2021 global top ranking
Sales, lead generation and service across DStv, DStv Stream, Showmax and DStv Internet. A 240-person digital live chat team across Century City and Mutual Park, seventy specialists on DStv Internet alone, and a sixteen-second average first response. Sustained through MultiChoice's transition into the Canal+ Group.
Digital Mall came back, twenty-four years after it first opened. We made a film to mark the relaunch and it goes all the way to the beginning, to the first mobile commerce transaction in the world, done on a South African network on a screen four lines tall.
Meszaros in EBnet on why South African contact centres should lead with AI-powered voice assistants, and separately on the harder problem underneath it: designing voice AI that copes with how South Africans actually speak.
Assabi and Maher were both appointed to the Mobile Marketing Association's South African board, and the group used the year to argue publicly that a digital skills pipeline is the answer to youth unemployment.
In the press
Award
BPESA Alchemy Awards
SA’s Got GBS Talent
Won for the MultiChoice partnership, covering inbound, outbound, network operations, lead generation, sales activations and live chat. Then won again in 2024 and made the finals in 2025. Three years running reads as a pattern rather than a claim.
Broadbrand and Digitalise's CEO was appointed global chief executive of True I/O, out of a strategic partnership between the two. True I/O's chairman put it plainly at the time: the partnership was a new chapter in their growth, and Maher was the person to lead it.
Award
GBS Alchemy Awards, Winner
Top Support Service Provider Award
Customer Experience Africa Awards, for omni-channel support across EMEA. The disclosed numbers were a seventy percent sales order conversion and close to R1.8 billion in sales. Brandon Meszaros had been working with Nando's for twenty-four years by then, which is the part of the award that actually matters.
Award
Best CX Team of the Year, Winner
CCCC, Cape Town, 30 July 2024
Award
BPESA GBS & BPO Conference and Alchemy Awards
Award
CapeBPO Awards, Winner
Top Support Services Provider
Award
CCMG National Contact Centre Awards, Finalist
Cyber cover for South African businesses and individuals, built to sit alongside Digital Resilience so that prevention and coverage come from the same place. Underwritten by iTOO Special Risks and carried by Hollard.
Founded 2024Proactive cyber insurance for South African businesses and individuals.
ProBusiness Protect
Corporate cyber cover, for the incident that gets through everything else.
ProSelf Protect
Personal identity, extortion and cyberbullying cover, distributed with McAfee consumer products.
Prevention and cover together
Built to pair with Digital Resilience, which is the argument: the people who harden you also carry the risk.
Underwritten properly
iTOO Special Risks paper, carried by Hollard.
An eSIM-first mobile service built on MVNE's own stack, released on iOS in June 2025. Partly a product, mostly a demonstration: this is what a brand can put its name on in under sixty days without owning a network.
Founded 2025Connectivity that moves with you. Add and manage eSIMs across local and international networks from one app.
eSIM first
No plastic, no courier, no store. Add a line in the app and it works.
No contract designed to keep you
That is the proposition, in their words, and it is the opposite of how the incumbents sell.
The white label
This is the reference build. A brand can put its own name on it and be live in under sixty days.
The empowerment transaction concluded in 2025. DSG sells mostly to large South African enterprises, where a supplier's B-BBEE level is a scored line in procurement rather than a footnote, so this is a commercial fact as much as a transformation one. It also puts ownership behind a position the group had already been taking for years, from the Maharishi Institute joint venture in 2016 onwards.
PEP, PEP Home, PEP Cell, PAXI, PEP Care and PEP Social Media, across more than three thousand stores. A hundred CX professionals working in all eleven South African languages, seventy percent of contacts contained in self-service, and 375,000 interactions in the festive season alone. Four of our agents finished in the global top ten on the qcontact platform.
“CXG has consistently delivered a high standard of customer experience, a trusted extension of our team.”
100Mbps uncapped fibre at five rand a day, in townships, sold as daily vouchers so nobody has to find a month's money upfront. Connected fibertimers went from eight thousand to over three hundred and thirty thousand in two years. Sixty-five CXG people support it around the clock, and the next phase is aiming at another twenty-fold. It is the best example in the group of a commercial model and a social outcome pointing in exactly the same direction.
Broadbrand built 1,200 ad variations across three brand stories from one creative system and kept optimising on click-through. It ran at sixteen times the FMCG display benchmark. FMCG display advertising is the wallpaper of the internet, and this was not that.
A customer data platform, retail media and loyalty engine, launched in Cape Town. Built inside the group, for the kind of operator problems we spend our days inside. Persaic, the AI production layer for product imagery and video, arrived the same year.
Founded 2025The richest customer data in the building, finally reaching marketing.
Go live in weeks
Not the nine-month customer data platform implementation everybody has been burned by.
Built for operators
Designed against the problems the group spends its days inside, rather than retrofitted from a retail CDP.
Retail media and loyalty
Not just a data store. The activation layer sits in the same platform.
In the group
Built and operated by Broadbrand, so the agency using it and the team building it are the same people.
CXG became an accredited member of GBPO Solutions, the first independent accreditation network built specifically for BPO. People practices, processes and policies, and the technology environment, all independently validated. It is worth more than most trophies because it is somebody else's signature rather than ours.
Award
BPESA Alchemy, Top Service Provider Finalist
Runner-up Top BPO Operator
MVNE alongside Jersey Telecom, MDS Global and Ycorp. South African teams have built mobile networks in one of the most demanding markets on earth, on thin margins, with load-shedding in the background. That mix of resilience and cost discipline turns out to be a genuine export.
In the press
DSG becomes the regional representative for the Telavox platform, bringing business communications to operators across the region. Operators want to sell their business customers more than connectivity, and this is the thing they sell them.
Three of the group's chief executives now run the MVNO Success Blueprint workshop together at MVNO Nation, Assabi on value-adds, Maher on AI-driven marketing and Meszaros on customer experience. Assabi also took the CX trends slot at CEM Africa and ran a workshop with MDS Global in Cape Town, and Digital Resilience shares a stand with Securonix at the ITWeb Security Summit.
In the press
ITWeb on the group's warning to financial services firms about what AI does to operational risk when nobody owns the outcome.
Our Cape Town contact centre holds a 6-Star Green Star SA rating, with over 3,600 solar panels and an off-grid water system. It is good for the ESG score of anyone who outsources to us, and on a load-shedding evening it is the difference between answering the phone and not.
Seven specialist businesses, three proprietary platforms, over a thousand people, six sites, and three million customer interactions a month. Still founder-led. Still privately held. Still, on the good days, doing something great.
From the client desk
Thanks again for the amazing experience. You guys are all legends! Afrihost are in a better place thanks to you all. Wish you and DSG all the success in the world.
We're thrilled to be working with DSG and Zendrive in bringing this cutting-edge motor insurance technology to South Africa.
We travelled a significant journey with DSG, from early triage during our growth period to full national 24/7/365 support and Fibrehoods onboarding. Their on-demand approach really supported our growth.
On behalf of the MultiChoice team I extend my gratitude to the MVNE team for your continued guidance and support. Your contributions have been nothing short of exceptional, and the commitment is unparalleled. I often have to remind myself that this is our product and not yours, given the ownership your team has demonstrated. MVNE has been our safety net each time, never missing a beat. We look forward to growing with you into our next project together.
Customer experiences are no longer an isolated piece of our business but part of a larger engagement strategy. DSG supports experiences that future-shock-proof our business, whilst changing lives.
DSG continues to surprise and delight our customers. We remained in partnership through a very difficult period, with DSG consistently working closely with us as we navigated the pandemic.
We outsource our support to DSG as the service and team response when corrections are needed remains rapid. We highly recommend DSG and its services.
CXG has consistently delivered a high standard of customer experience, a trusted extension of our team.
The people who carry it
A group this shape only works if somebody is accountable for each part of it and everybody is accountable for the whole. These are the ten, several of whom have been here for most of the twenty-eight years.
Yaron Assabi
Group Founder & CEO
Ferdi Gazendam
Chairman & Executive Director
Dr Isaac "Oupa" Monamodi
Executive Director · Chairman, Broadbrand
Brandon Meszaros
CEO, CXG & Digital Resilience
John Natorp
Group CFO
Shantal Naidoo
Group HR & Legal Director
Vincent Maher
CEO, Broadbrand & Digitalise
Jaydev Chiba
Executive Director
Edward Wicks
Chief Commercial Officer, MVNE
Pragashani Reddy
Chief Revenue Officer
Where twenty-eight years landed
Most enterprises buy customer experience from one vendor, marketing from another, connectivity from a third and security from a fourth, and then discover that nobody owns the outcome. The group exists so that somebody does.
Since 1998
Customer experience, BPO and BPaaS. The largest business in the group and the one that started it all.
Since 2013
Mobile virtual network enablement. Live operations across five African markets, with a global consortium launched at MWC 2026.
Since 2012
AI-driven marketing and martech, relaunched in 2025 as a publisher-first ad network.
Since 2026
Full-service digital. Websites, paid media, SEO and creative that has to prove its return.
Since 2018
Cyber security and managed security services, with eleven global platform partnerships.
Since 2024
Cyber insurance for businesses and individuals, built to pair with prevention rather than replace it.
Since 1999
The software, IP and customer-data engineering layer sitting under everything else.
Built in-house
Enterprise customer data platform, retail media and loyalty.
AI production layer for product imagery and product video.
Mediation, assurance and revenue services for mobile operators.
Thank you
Twenty-eight years of them. Some are clients today, some were clients a long time ago, and a few have been here almost the whole way.
The technology, security and telecoms platforms we build on. Not clients, which is why they sit on their own row.
September 2026
None of the above happens without clients who were willing to try something before it was obviously going to work. The retailer who put a catalogue online in 1999. The commission that trusted us with an election. The brand that let us port every restaurant phone number in the country into one system. The operator who let us run the care layer for their newest product. We know what that costs in nerve, and we have never taken it lightly.
Here is to the next one.
“DSG represents both Digital Solutions Group and Doing Something Great, and for our team it stands for Getting Stuff Done.”
Yaron AssabiGroup Founder & CEO