Terms and privacy

Last updated 21 September 2026

What FinWise is, and what it is not

FinWise SA reads financial documents you upload and answers questions about South African money matters. It gives you information.

It does not give financial advice. Under the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act 37 of 2002, advice means a recommendation, guidance or proposal about buying a particular financial product, and only a licensed Financial Services Provider may give it. FinWise is not a licensed FSP. So it will show you your position, the published benchmark for a household like yours, and the difference between them. It will not tell you what to buy, from whom, or whether a product you hold is right for you.

If you want that, we can introduce you to a licensed FSP, but only if you ask us to.

Accuracy

The figures come from the documents you give us and from published South African benchmarks, and they are produced by software. Check anything you intend to act on. We are not liable for decisions taken on the strength of this report, which is part of why it does not tell you what to do.

Subscription

One document analysis and one chat question are free. After that a subscription is R30 a month, which covers fair personal use rather than unlimited automated use. Payments are handled by Polar, who are the merchant of record, so they take the payment and carry the VAT. We never see your card. Cancel any time and you keep what you have paid for until the end of that month.

Your personal information (POPIA)

The responsible party is Jacques Viviers, trading as Slim Jan, who is also the Information Officer. Reach us at hello@slimjan.site.

What we collect: your email address, and optionally your name, phone number and province. Any documents you upload. The analysis produced from them. Questions you ask the chat.

What we keep, and what we do not. Uploaded documents are processed in memory and are not written to our storage. The report produced from them is kept, in your account, so you can come back to it. That report contains figures drawn from your documents, including income, debts and cover, so treat it as the sensitive thing it is. Deleting your account deletes it.

Processing outside South Africa. To read your documents and answer your questions we send their contents to DeepSeek, an artificial intelligence provider which processes and stores data in the People’s Republic of China. Our hosting (Railway, United States), email (Resend, United States) and payments (Polar, United States) are also outside the country.

We name the country because POPIA section 18 says you are entitled to know it, and because the answer matters. South Africa has no adequacy finding for China, and DeepSeek does not publish a data processing agreement or a retention commitment for its API. So the lawful basis for that transfer is your consent under section 72, not a finding that the destination is equally protective, and you should treat the consent as the real decision it is. If you are not comfortable with it, do not upload documents. The chat and the rest of the site still work, although your questions go the same way.

Being contacted by an adviser is a separate, optional consent. We only pass your details to a licensed FSP if you asked us to, and you can withdraw that at any time by mailing us.

How long we keep it. Your account and its reports stay while you use the site. If you have not signed in for two years we delete the account and everything in it, after mailing the address on it first. You do not have to wait for that: you can delete it yourself at any time.

Your rights. Under POPIA you may ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, and ask us to delete it. Two of those are buttons, not requests: your account page will download everything we hold about you as a file, and will delete your account, its reports and its analyses permanently. For a correction, or anything else, mail hello@slimjan.site. You may also complain to the Information Regulator.

Security

Your report is behind your login and nobody else can fetch it. Passwords are hashed. We publish nothing about you. If we ever became aware of a compromise affecting your information we would tell you and the Information Regulator, as POPIA requires.

Changes

If we change any of this materially we will say so here and date it. The date at the top is the version you are reading.