Travelex, the world’s dominant player in foreign exchange, and FX Africa, an up-and-coming leader in the Southern African market, celebrated their new partnership at a gala dinner for business partners and clients in Johannesburg on August 21.

The evening was hosted by Founder and Chairman of FX Africa Sean Maloney and Founder and Chairman of the Travelex Group Lloyd Dorfman.

Master of Ceremonies FX Africa Managing Director Darren Jenkins-Ferrett opened the evening at the Sandton Sun hotel by saying, “Today is an historic occasion. I promised Mr Dorfman we’d eat, sleep and breathe his brand and it’s a promise I intend to live up to.”

He recounted how Dorfman had started Travelex, now the world’s biggest foreign exchange company, as a single bureau in Southampton Road in London with a loan of £25 000 in 1976, and had grown it into a company valued at more than £1-billion in 2005.

In a speech packed with anecdotes, Dorfman noted that Travelex had retail outlets at about 40% of the world’s airports, often as the sole forex retailer, or one of only two, with the potential to sell foreign exchange to 1,5-billion passing passengers a year. “Airports are the strategic crossroads of the global village,” he said.

Dorfman also pointed out that apart from retail foreign exchange, “We are the world’s largest non-bank supplier of global trade payments.” A third arm of Travelex, he said, was the fast-growing outsourcing business, which essentially entails selling pre-paid foreign exchange cards, “the plastic traveller’s cheques of the 20th Century. For us, this is a very core business and part of our future.”

Dorfman said that Travelex’s future lay not only in organic growth, but also in growth in new markets, including India, China and Japan. “The one gaping hole in our plan was to have a retail plan in Southern Africa,” he said, adding of the partnership with FX Africa: “We’re very excited about it; it offers huge potential.”

Dorfman ended with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

Jenkins-Ferrett introduced FX Africa Founder and Chairman Sean Maloney as a gutsy entrepreneur, who similarly to Dorfman, had built a dominant forex company from a single retail outlet, in Zimbabwe in 1995. Of Maloney he said jokingly, “Sometimes he frustrates the hell out of me and sometimes he inspires the hell out of me. As he said to me recently, ‘Darren, sometimes I’m your mentor, sometimes I’m your tormentor!’”

Maloney thanked FX Africa’s customers and service providers over the years, and promised the guests, “This association with Travelex will help you feel at home overseas.”

Maloney recalled meeting Dorfman for the first time in his offices in London in 1988. “I warmed to him immediately and hoped I would do business with him one day.”

He also recounted some of challenges FX Africa had met in the past, including the decision to leave Zimbabwe in 2002, when the foreign exchange industry was effectively shut down, and to start up shop in South Africa, with two small branches in Messina and Pretoria. “We found ourselves in South Africa in a very competitive market, and seriously under-capitalised,” he remembered. FX Africa today has “more than 22 branches and 130 staff”, said Maloney.

He showed slides of FX Africa’s first logo and early retail outlets, finishing with one of Travelex’s latest bureau in Heathrow’s Terminal 5. “This is what we’re aiming for.”

The evening’s guest speaker, South African rugby personality Joel Stransky, who kicked the winning drop goal for South Africa to win the 1995 World Cup, gave a speech peppered with humour, memories and his opinion on who would win the 2007 Rugby World Cup (“I’m sorry to say, not England,” he told Dorfman).

Stransky argued that only four teams had a realistic chance of winning the coveted William Webb Ellis trophy: Australia, France, South Africa and New Zealand, and that his money would be on either South Africa or New Zealand, with the latter probably having the slight edge, though anything could happen.

Stransky recalled that on the morning before South Africa’s historic 1995 win, the team’s manager, Morné du Plessis, had read out the very same Roosevelt quote Dorfman had highlighted earlier in the evening to the Springbok team. It was a coincidence, he said, “That bodes very well for the future of the partnership between Travelex and FX Africa”.

ENJOYING THE EVENING: Guests at the launch celebration of the new Travelex-FX Africa partnership.

Nancy Zhu and Gill Dodds	Gavin Visser, Viona Jonosky and Lee Savage	Stanley Kieser, Myles Janssens and Eleanor Woodman
Ronnie Moodley and Hennie Pretorius	Justin Moore and Ian Dry	Marilyn Lazarus, Vanessa Tait and Chantel Mare
Marian and Diana Sardu	Nick Bedford and Felicity Bedford	Brett Parker, Prudence Bekker and Anthony Kasanhayi
Lindiwe Gadd, Michael Wang, Godfrey Morley, Rong Gao and Themba Khumalo	Nuri Jhetam, Aysha Leher, Gairoonisha Booley and Moegamad Booley	Steven Chambers, Wynand du Preez and Graham Donaldson