New JSE CEO Leila Fourie on growth plans for the exchange
No fear of heights for bourse’s Leila Fourie, a keen rock climber
● Her predecessor, Nicky Newton-King, was into cycling. For Leila Fourie, who took over as the JSE’s new CEO on October 1, it’s rock climbing.
And not small rocks, either. I get vertigo just listening to Fourie describe the challenges of climbing “multi-pitch” (where you need more than one rope to get to the top) or talk about having to strengthen her hands to grip “pockets” that are only three fingers wide.
What she does is called free climbing, she says, with harnesses and ropes, not the solo climbing depicted in a recent, terrifying movie.
It’s a passion Fourie, 51, acquired during her time in Australia, where she spent just over three years as CEO of the Australian Payments Clearing Association before being lured back to the JSE, where she had been an executive director.
“I was not at all looking to come back at the time,” she says. “I was very happy where I was, in my commercial capacity and in the climbing and mountaineering environment.
“But the JSE is a very special role,” she says, pointing to the exchange’s important role in contributing to transformation and particularly to inclusive and sustainable growth in SA.
“As my predecessor used to say: ‘This job is not a pay cheque, it’s a privilege.’ ”
Before rock climbing it was eight years of high-altitude mountaineering in locations such as Antarctica and Russia. Fourie has over the past two years climbed in Tasmania, mainland Australia and New Zealand. But SA also offers world-class rock climbing, she says, in areas such as Waterval Boven in Mpumalanga and the Cederberg in the Western Cape. She has her Australian climbing girlfriends coming out to sample it with her in the new year.
You find yourself hoping that the JSE has good key-person insurance on its new hire. But for Fourie, apart from being therapeutic, rock climbing is intellectually demanding — and offers important lessons for business. She talks about making your way up a rock face and how crucial it is to “read the climb” and strategise and sequence your handholds correctly — otherwise you end up falling.
As with business, when conditions are easy there are a number of avenues, but an extremely difficult route is different: “In really tough macroeconomic conditions you have far fewer options and you have to rely on your skill and read the route carefully before you climb.”
Rock climbing is also a really interesting lesson in trust, says Fourie, one you learn through falling. “You have to trust that the rope will catch you, which means trusting the person who is belaying you.”
Trust is a big part of Fourie’s vision for the JSE. She has already sat down with her executive committee to set out a vision with three key priorities — building partnerships to co-create growth, rebuilding the trust in SA’s capital markets that has been damaged by the corporate scandals of the past three years, and contributing to nation building and the national agenda.
Rebuilding trust is an objective in the bond markets too and especially when it comes to SOEs, such as Eskom and Transnet, whose bonds are listed on the JSE. The JSE’s proposed new debt-market listing requirements for SOEs will introduce new transparency requirements and contain a new section on governance, as well as requiring disclosure on procurement policies. “In addition, they will include consequences for acts of the past,” Fourie says intriguingly, though she declines at this stage to provide details.
An economist with a doctorate from the University of Johannesburg in economic and financial sciences, Fourie has the benefit of having been at the JSE from 2012 to 2016, during which time she oversaw operations accounting for more than 50% of the JSE’s revenue and led the T+3 project to cut the time it takes to settle transactions on the equities market. Before that she consulted to the JSE in the early 2000s and was MD of Standard Bank’s card division.
Her two months at the JSE have been eventful: she has been appointed by the UN secretary-general to an elite grouping of 30 global executives in the Global Investors for Sustainable Development and co-chaired its first meeting in October with Investec CEO Fani Titi. She also went on a road show to foreign investors last month, culminating in the high-level annual SA Tomorrow conference in New York, which the JSE co-sponsors.
Interestingly, the conference, which came just after the muchworse-than-expected mediumterm budget policy statement, saw a last-minute rush of debt market investors wanting to attend. Fourie says there was significant interest in SA’s bond market from international investors — driven by the search for yield and by waning interest in markets such as Russia. Foreign bond market investors are also signalling their appetite to invest in Eskom’s transmission business, if the unbundling goes ahead as planned.
Though the number of equity market listings on the JSE has declined to just 355, Fourie points out that the JSE’s bond market listings have expanded — and that foreign investors continue to favour SA’s bond market even as money flows out of the equity market.
Fourie is looking to launch another SA Tomorrow conference in Southeast-Asia, in line with one of her key objectives for the JSE, which is to grow SA’s investor base in that region.
“My time abroad has opened my mind to the growth node in Asia and we are taking some active steps to develop that market,” says Fourie, who will also be aiming to attract inward listings to the JSE by SoutheastAsian companies.
She sees inward secondary listings — by companies outside SA that are already listed on other markets — as a growth area for the exchange and will be looking to attract these from markets such as Seychelles and Mauritius, which are much less traded than the JSE. “The JSE is a deeply liquid market and we punch way above our weight in an emerging economy, so inbound secondary listings could be very attractive if appropriately marketed,” she says.
The other key area which she sees as a crucial focus area for the JSE — and crucial as a growth driver for SA — is small and medium-size enterprises. She sees potential for public and private sectors to collaborate to try to enable a more structured approach to the SME market — one that “would be a unique and alternative approach”, she says.
Though the JSE’s AltX market, which targets smaller companies, has been an important feeder for listings on its main board — 30% of AltX companies go on to the list on the main board — the JSE will look to create a new board dedicated to SMEs or new instruments to support these.
Fourie and her team are clearly applying their collective minds and want to work collaboratively on this.
Meanwhile, she’s seeking to get a more positive narrative on SA from its business leaders. “We need to avoid over-indexing on the negative — we need a can-do approach by big business particularly.”
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