Priya Rowjee

Every day is a great opportunity to claw one back for the ordinary person in a corruption-infested South Africa that is making every one of us poorer.

The defining moment of my career was when I left a successful career in the corporate world to join a few ex-colleagues and friends in starting a new bank. This was a daunting move after having spent most of my career in a world where complex challenges were sheltered by the relative security of size, then moving to another world of complex challenges with no security.

When I was growing up I feared failure and the devastation I thought would ensue. I wanted to be perfect and felt any form of failure was letting me and other people down, particularly my mother who had made tremendous sacrifices in bringing up three children alone on a music teacher’s salary.

The glow of the newly installed blue iridescent Paul’s Homemade Ice Cream logo on the opening of our first the store in The Zone, Rosebank, in December 2015, was a moment that brought with it an understanding of where my career was rapidly moving.

The most defining moment in my life was when I realised that black women could own a bank that focuses on entrepreneurs, but most importantly it was having my own people affirming my dream by supporting it financially.

I was a really good social worker. I loved working in a community, doing long-term development work with individuals and groups. However, because I was a good social worker, I quickly became a manager of peers, then teams and projects, and ultimately organisations.