Karabo Ngoatle
Dumelang 👋🏽 Welcome, visitor.
Pronounced: Kah-RAH-boh · N-gwah-tleh
Customer Experience & Product Executive. Founder. Builder.
I'm the Group CEO of Detour, a financial platform helping e-hailing and delivery drivers close the cash-flow gap between shifts. Seventeen years of design, strategy and delivery, grounded in Batho Pele: people first.
Hands-on as a builder. Fluent across strategy, product, engineering and commercial.
Design squads in banks and insurers. A venture team stood up from scratch.
Research to high-fidelity UI, shipped in tight loops with engineers.
In the codebase, not just the canvas. Architecture to live product.
Partners, compliance and unit economics, with founders, lawyers and accountants.
Earn. Advance. Reward.
A financial platform for South Africa's gig drivers. Led end-to-end: product, design, architecture and build, plus partners, compliance and operations. Live since March 2026.
A Detour driver, in his own words.
Negotiated and signed Uber as a strategic partner: fleet integration, driver onboarding and live earnings data at the source.
The gap between doing the work and getting paid for it is where debt traps start. A flat tyre or an empty tank can park a driver mid-shift.
A regulated fintech only ships when every seat at the table moves together.
The work started with the data model and the integrations a regulated wallet needs: Uber Fleet API, WhatsApp Cloud API, Nedbank rails and Mastercard issuing, on a Postgres core.
A complete financial cushion for drivers: earned wages, fuel, health, mentorship and somewhere to cash out.
Withdraw up to 50% of wages already earned.
Advance fuel instantly. Get back on the road.
Instant cash against work done. 0% interest, up to R5 000.
Health cover for independent drivers.
Mentorship, financial coaching and regular check-ins.
Round-the-clock help, with commercial and legal backing.
The hard half is operating a lender: funding the pool, paying drivers, meeting SLAs, keeping an immutable record. Built alongside the app.
Finances: pool balance, outstanding and live transactions.
Support Ops: live case, WhatsApp thread, SLA timers, audit trail.
Every driver onboards through a real conversation. Confusion gets fixed in the moment and fed back into the product. Support is the richest research channel.
People first means a driver who pays at 22:14 knows exactly what happens next.
A career across financial services, retail, energy, aviation and the public sector — always at the intersection of design, technology and operations. BA Honours and Advanced Diploma in UX Design, Inscape.
Bootstrapped Detour, a compliant, bank-integrated financial platform for the gig economy. The full story is above.
Led CX strategy and design teams across Africa, Europe, India and the US for clients in financial services, retail and the public sector.
As Executive Design Lead at Nedbank, shipped personal-loan, overdraft and credit-card journeys with 12 engineers: over R1 billion disbursed.
Owned the internal experience ecosystem for 30,000+ employees as a member of the Group Exco. Embedded service design and built the measurement framework that got features to people faster.
A published Workday journey: benefit enrolment across 30,000+ employees.
A decade of senior roles in service design and digital transformation.
Eight public-service principles, translated into product.
Ask the people you build for. Then ask again.
Design for the mid-range phone and slow network, not the demo device.
Tone is product. Greet people, not ticket numbers.
Say exactly what happens next. 0% means 0%.
An immutable audit trail on every action.
When it breaks, fix it fast and visibly.
Every rand has to earn its keep.
Set the bar publicly and hold everyone to it, myself included.
