! Financial literacy 101

Sagui Hamed has spent 12 years advising clients on how to protect, grow, and pass on their fortunes. As founder and CEO of Square Capital Group, a Dubai-based boutique investment advisory and wealth management firm, she has built a practice around succession planning, family wealth structuring, and business institutionalization for ultra-high-net-worth clients across the GCC and Egypt.

Now she is turning her attention to a different clientele entirely: young professionals in their twenties and thirties who have money coming in and no idea what to do with it.

The trigger was a series of conversations with her children's friends, with young acquaintances, with the sons and daughters of her own clients — that revealed a pattern she found alarming. “They come to me and say they want to buy gold, or buy stocks, and they don't know where to start,” she says. “But the deeper problem is that some of them don't even have a bank account. They have supplementary cards from their parents. They have never made a single financial decision on their own.”

More troubling to Hamed than the knowledge gap was the mindset behind it. She traces the problem to a piece of parenting wisdom that is common in our culture: save so you can buy something nice. “That phrase is detrimental,” she says. “If you instill a mindset that the purpose of money is to purchase things, then that is exactly what they will do for the rest of their lives. Nobody teaches them that money can be left alone, that it can grow, that it can be passed on.”

Hamed, who grew up the daughter of a banker, was trading on the Egyptian stock exchange before she turned 21. She began her career as a banker at CIB then moved on to investment banking at Pharos and NBK Capital in Kuwait. “I’ve come to realize that the way I was brought up was not the norm.”

Her financial literacy course is designed to close the knowledge gap. It is structured as 12 modules starting with very basic steps: opening multi-currency bank accounts if you don’t already have them, opening a brokerage account, and progressing through asset classes, risk assessment, and portfolio construction. The 12 modules can be completed over an average of 3-months.

The course, which will be offered under the Square Capital umbrella, is deliberately practical. Hamed has arranged for brokerage firms and banks to attend sessions and open accounts for participants on the spot. There are assignments like ‘go make your first EGP 1k and report back.’ She plans to run it as a mix of group sessions and one-on-one advisory, reflecting the reality that financial situations vary from one participant to the next.

She walks students through asset classes beginning with cash and semi-cash instruments like blue-chip equities and bonds, moves into commodities such as gold and silver, then into real estate — including fractional ownership platforms that allow entry with minimal capital — and eventually into managed funds. The key metric, she stresses, is relative: “a 15% annual return on EGP 10k matters just as much as a 15% return on one mn. And as your income grows, consumption should stay flat in absolute terms while your savings rate climbs. It can start with EGP 1k or EGP 1 mn," she says. “The important thing is the concept.”

What makes the course distinctive is its insistence on regional specificity. Global personal finance principles, Hamed argues, can’t be applied blindly in an Egyptian context. “The pound-denominated economy has its own dynamics. The brokerage infrastructure, the available fund products — gold and dollar funds, money market instruments — are local. You cannot apply anything from the Canadian or American market here,” she says. “The laws are different, the currencies are different, the age requirements are different.”

Hamed is equally pointed about the advisory gap. At a certain level of wealth, she notes, banks should send a private banker to your door. Below that threshold, the “wealth management” on offer tends to amount to product-pushing — car loans, credit facilities, insurance packages sold without context. That is true anywhere in the world so you have to do your homework and know which questions to ask.”

The course is, in part, her answer to that structural failure. She vehemently disagrees with the common generational critique that young people are lazy, that they hang out in cafes all day, that they are glued to their phones. “I think the young generation is super smart and super equipped,” she says. “They have all the tools in the world”.

“The same phone you use to impulse-buy online can be used to build a portfolio. The same digital fluency that makes you a competent consumer can make you a competent investor. The habit is identical, it is the direction that needs to change.” Hamed calls the tech enabled ability to make and track investments within minutes by just tapping on your phone, ‘impulse investing,’ and she thinks it's a good thing.

And the math is persuasive. “Cut EGP 1,000 a day in discretionary spending — the coffee, the delivery orders, the impulse purchases — and you are saving EGP 30,000 a month. Compound that over a decade and the number is transformative. “The kids don't understand that small savings can make them a lot of money,” Hamed says. “But they can.”

Hamed’s financial literacy course is currently being piloted and will formally launch soon. She would like to eventually offer a wealth planning and succession course to cover sophisticated investors and inheritors of family wealth.