Market welcomes Investec’s new CEOs
Investec’s decision to plump for joint CEOs to succeed founders Stephen Koseff and Bernard Kantor was well met by the market: the bank’s shares were among just five stocks that ended higher on the JSE’s top 40 after Tuesday’s rout.
Investec plc gained 3.12% to close at R93.99, although it has chronically underperformed its local peers since opting for a dual London-Johannesburg listing in 2002. Investec shares have gained only 253% since, while the JSE’s banks index has rallied 631%.
While Hendrik du Toit, founder of the group’s assetmanagement arm, may have been an obvious choice, Fani Titi, Investec’s chairman and a nonexecutive since 2004, is an outlier who few had expected.
Numis Securities analyst James Hamilton said: “Hendrick du Toit does not surprise me at all, but Fani is more unusual.”
“You guys might not have seen it but we saw it,” said Koseff, Investec’s CEO.
“Fani expressed an interest to take an executive role some
time back and we felt that he’d be a very strong candidate.
“Hendrick is strong on the asset-management side, he’s less of a banker, while Fani understands the banking side. He’s spent a lot of time in all our different committees … he’s good with the people and we’re very happy with the choice.”
While Investec has always had a joint management structure in Koseff as CEO and Kantor as MD, Business Leadership SA’s (BLSA’s) reaction to the news was hardly unequivocal.
“One of the key pillars of BLSA’s contract with SA is transformation.… This appointment advances that goal,” said BLSA president Bonang Mohale.
But, Mohale said, the joint CEO role where one is black “perpetuates the narrative that black people cannot manage either a complex business and/or a global business on their own”.
The rebuke is interesting as Koseff serves on the BLSA board. “We’re a global firm, we’re very happy with the structure and they can bleat as much as they like,” he said.
Investec is adamant that a joint executive structure is necessary with Titi to oversee the South African operations and Du Toit to focus on its international businesses.
“We’re not hierarchical, we’re not top-down and therefore it’s important to have very strong people in two geographies,” Koseff said.
Investec also announced a raft of other appointments, including Kim Macfarland, the current chief operating officer, as group finance director, who succeeds Glynn Burger, one of Investec’s founding members.
Ciaran Whelan, the present global joint head of the specialist bank replaces Burger as executive director on the board and will also take on the role of head of risk from April 1 2019.
David van der Walt and Richard Wainwright, who some believe were passed over for the top CEO roles, will remain as CEO of Investec Bank plc and Investec Bank Ltd, respectively.
Koseff and Kantor plan to step down on October 1 and will continue as executives until March 31 2019, after which they will become nonexecutive directors.