CEO Conversation with Investec Group Chief Executive, Fani Titi

Good evening everyone and thank you so much, Professor, for the invitation. As I walked in, I remembered my days some years ago when I did an MBA and we used to have colleagues from industry come in to talk about their experiences, so it was a bit surreal. But thank you for the invitation. I suppose leadership, as you say, is something that you continue to develop throughout your life. So as an example, in my early days because we were a pretty large family, the idea that my life was not only about me but about the interest of the broader family was an idea that took root pretty early in life. Understanding that your interests do not supersede the interest of others and that common interest is important. I came from a pretty large family, a very poor family, born on a farm in the Free State. My father could only read or write two years of substandard B, as it was called in those years. My mother could not read or write. And yet in their very desires for their children, different as they were, you learned a sense of aspiration. My father was very optimistic, really believed in the power of positive thinking, the power of possibility. My mother on the other hand was quite protective of her kids, very strict, a disciplinarian. So I learned that time that you need both the optimism and the inspiration of a future that you want to work towards, but you need the discipline of work to really do what is necessary. So those three areas of personal learning and leadership have set me well in life: a sense of hope and optimism and possibility on the one hand, and knowledge that you have to be disciplined and there's a price and a sacrifice to make, and thirdly the fact that it is not only about me, that you have to have an understanding of common interest, a common future, a common destiny. That's powerful in terms of connecting to the purpose-driven leadership that you continue to have within Investec.

11 years old, I was out in the Free State at a little town called Vber between Kroonstad and Bloemfontein on a farm. And we were the only family on that particular out-farm. So a fairly circumscribed set of living conditions, being on a farm. And that was the future for a guy like me. I would have probably looked after cattle, I would probably have walked in the field. Or the highest rank in those days – you guys won't believe this – was being a driver of a tractor. That is really an expert: you can drive it straight as you start to sow, and you can drive it straight when you start to harvest. So that was the pinnacle of what I thought life could offer. But you still attract a driver.

But you somehow didn't stick to the script, I suppose. And this is what I generally advise younger people to do: not to think too far ahead and put stress on your life as it happens. The year after my 11th, my father had a bit of a, shall we say, a kafa and a bit of a scrap with the farmer. He had had too many of them.

In the neighboring farmland who couldn't get a job anywhere. As it happens, the Nationalist Party had designed this most brilliant plan called separate development, which meant that black people generally would be divided by tribe so that the nationalists would be able to continue to rule over black people because they're divided. Being a Southern Sotho speaker, we went to a little place called QwaQwa, which was a homeland for the Sotho people. Can you guys say it? Okay, there we go. For my white compatriots, the trick is to have your tongue right at the back of your palate, that's how you do it. It's not too difficult. So I mean, as you would know, for those who were Xhosa, you would get shipped out to Transkei; for those who were Pedi or spoke Pedi, you would be shipped out to Lebowa; and his guys would have Venda as their place of permanent citizenship. So in essence, one door closed. You were South African, then you lost your citizenship and you went to a new country called QwaQwa. It was not quite a country like Bophuthatswana or Transkei, but it was on the road there. Okay, so the lesson for me was: while there may well be a setback, and there may be a disruption of a future that you see, and you think a particular door closes, life is always so amazing that other doors do open. So what would have happened in 1974 when I was 12? That was the year in which I would have gone into the farm labor system permanently. You know, 1974 was a wonderful year, like the most important year of my life. Can you imagine? That's the start of your life. So I would have not had any other opportunity to further my education. So I went through to QwaQwa, started over there, and thankfully I could then go into standard five. That was a pivotal moment because I could get to study.

If I knew, I would be like... But surely, I mean, do you come from a family of undercover mathematicians? Not quite, not quite. I think it's a combination of a number of things. I think each one of us gets born with a particular set of attributes, and ours is to find those attributes and to cultivate them to be the best we can be. Second, we require an environment that can support the development of the innate gifts and talents that we have. In my case, I was born with an orientation towards mathematics and science. I had a family that had a structure, and one of the greatest destructions of the apartheid movement at the time was that families were not together. So while farms were pretty rough in those days, there was an integrity of a family structure. You had a father and mother. If there was a problem with a roof that gets blown away in August, there's somebody who can fix it. There's a mother who can instill discipline. So the cultivation of the innate gifts I had became much more possible because of that family structure that was there. The destruction of family structures is one of the things we have to deal with as a country, because you grow up in societies where firstly there are no role models, second there isn't an example of what a life should be for a young child, thirdly there are so many households that are child-headed and the levels of poverty are quite high. So in my case, born with certain gifts, lucky that I grew up in a family where there were two parents, and of course we had siblings, and we were able to develop whatever gifts that we had. I mean, when we got to matric, we were taught by somebody who had matric.

So that's been the journey. So when I look at my own journey, my own level of achievement or lack of it, I always compare myself only to myself, because the gifts and capabilities and abilities I have, I was born with. I was born into a family that helped me to have a particular structure that allowed me to be successful. So the only comparison is about the opportunity I had and what I've done with it. So I've never compared myself with you, the professor, because you've done a lot better than I could ever do. But I haven't had a Fulbright scholarship, I haven't been to UC Berkeley. I don't have a UC Berkeley on my CV as a degree. Small little university on the west coast of the US, which is responsible for some of the big giant tech companies that rule the world.

I mean, obviously I'm quite distracted by what's happened to the US now, a divided country, post-truth, a country that does not necessarily believe in the best of values, just given the epoch we are in now. So the America I went to in the early 80s...

Not quite, not quite. So it was getting better, yeah, it was getting better, mid-80s, mid-80s. So coming from a firstly a very restricted society because it was highly controlled, information was very much limited. You couldn't – I mean, you could be imprisoned for reading an article that had the name ANC on it. Literally. For you it may sound like hyperbole, but that is the truth. And very segregated. So the first time I get to Berkeley around August of 86, beautiful, beautiful. Just to put it in context: South Africa is burning in 1986, I know, right? So just understand where he's coming from. We've had a guy called 'South African problems will be solved by South Africans and not by foreigners.' The crocodile, right, his head is Rubicon speech, and it's taken us back. Right, and so this is your context, and you leave and you go to that very strange part of the world.

The first marvel was a society that is open and where nothing is taken necessarily as dogma. So you get into university, even the existence of God as we assumed here in the country that was a given was not a given anymore within a university system. So the openness to challenge, to think differently, to be yourself was probably the most important discovery of a different society. Obviously the lack of racial, at least legally enforced racial separation, was something that was particularly interesting as well. The level of technology that you got exposed to was interesting. So it was a completely new world, a world that could be discovered, a world that could be experienced, and it was fantastic. Still, I went out on a one-way ticket, so the only way you could go home was through an aircraft. And from time to time from San Francisco International Airport you see an airplane go up and say goodness me, when do I ever get to go back home? I could only speak to my mom about once every week or every second week, and she had to walk from the village about three or four kilometers to get to a place where there was a telephone. So a contrast of a highly technologically advanced world, an open society as we heard it at that time, against a restricted, a very segregated and in fact a very oppressive country. Two worlds, but really an opportunity to experience life differently, like the rest of us – let me rather say the most of us in this room.

Let me just trace my career history a little bit, because let me give you a sense of perspective. So when I finished my studies, I went into teaching mathematics. Coming out of a large family, my father was actually a patriarch, so not only did we have our immediate family, we had a number of other families with us. So sustenance was really quite important. In our growing up, on an average day you would have a pap maybe with salt, sometimes with sugar, sometimes with water and sugar. So the idea of getting out of that as quickly as possible and the idea of getting a job that was much safer was attractive. So safety of tenure and the ability to start to look after family, so I went into teaching because that was the safest of those routes. After a period of five years of teaching, I felt I could do a bit more interesting stuff with my life. I had started to repeat what I taught the previous year, it was getting a little difficult. So I thought, look, what would I like to do? I've been fortunate in life to get an education, I've been able to go overseas, I've had an expansion in my life view through my exposure to the US, particularly the West Coast. What would I like to be? So I decided I'm not going to be a mathematics teacher for the rest of my life. I would like to get into a space that is a little broader, where you work with a lot of variety and you work with a lot of people. If you're into mathematics and you do research, you get narrower and narrower and narrower as you go, the people you can talk to become fewer and fewer. That's what specialization can do. So I decided I'd like to go into business. I remember at that time already married with a child, and it was a difficult life choice. But I've always had this sense that you've got to take some risk for there to be progress and for you to achieve some of the urgings you develop inside of you. So I cashed in everything I had, went to build the school, and at that time asked my wife then to go back to have people her family because I wanted to study. So that was an important part of life. Went in for two years, then I started. So I experienced for a period of four or five years the sense of working for others. And what was important was that – and this is really important for young people – you have to have a particular skill that you bring, a contribution you can make. You have to have a passion about what it is that lights your fire, why do you wake up every morning. And you have to have a desire to contribute further and beyond your own circle. Can you make an impact in life beyond you? So these are the things that have driven my progress in life. So going into my own business, having gained experience over a period of time, worked for RMB, worked for the development bank, then got an opportunity to work at KTH in a private equity environment. When I got into that environment for the first time in my working life, I had a confluence of my skills, my passion being investing at the time, and a sense of a greater purpose. So in life I generally say look for a skill and a contribution you can make, the passion to do that potentially even if you didn't get paid – and possibly that's why I work here, impact, you know. Okay, I'll talk to my shareholders, you just increase your fee.

So I found my calling, as it were. This is what I'm going to do. I love being on my own, I love the challenge to either succeed or fail. When I left teaching at university, an old professor of mine said, 'My boy, you're going into a risky environment. You're likely to come back here with your tail between your legs. For a black person like you, industry is not going to be accepting.' So the sense of risk, the desire to succeed, and the desire to be on my own – when you own your own business, the buck literally stops with you. So in the first year when we started our own business, having worked at KTH, having built a brand capability and an ability to raise money, we wanted to start a business with two of my friends. So we tried to go bank 7.5 million that we raised to start TSA, and we couldn't. It was difficult. 'Where is the money from? What are you going to do with it?' We try to buy a fax machine, we didn't want to pay cash for it, we wanted to rent a fax machine and rent a printer. 'Now your business, okay, can you give us three months bank statements?' But we are starting, we don't have any bank statements. We have to sign personal guarantees for a fax machine, yeah, anything and everything you do. So I love smaller environments where you have to do every single thing from buying coffee, getting a fax machine, signing a personal guarantee to get a photocopy. That experience was absolutely beautiful. But we had complete control of our destiny, and there's no better fulfillment if you want to create something of value than being there in the fight as it were and trying to build something. So over a seven- or eight-year period, we built a business of significance and substance, and that got me into investing. So you have these opportunities in life, and you have doors that open by chance. I say this to a lot of my colleagues: success is a funny thing. First and foremost, you've got to get what I talked about: skill and the level of contribution, passion, and purpose. But you also need to be lucky. Luck plays a great role in the life of individuals. Of course, you've got to work hard. As Gary Player says, to be luckier, you've got to be prepared. You've got to be in the field. You can't score a try if you're not in the field. So you're going to be in the field, you've got to have your sleeves up, and you're going to fall from time to time. And I've made many mistakes and I failed a few times. But the deep and burning desire to be successful, to make a contribution, to have impact.

Sometimes more than I would like to accept, I do develop doubts. Five years ago, I got given the opportunity as you know to lead Investec as the chief executive – I always leave the 'O' part because 'officer' sounds military and command and control, I like chief executive without the 'O'. So I followed the founder who had been in the business for 40 years, somebody who is larger than life, the most complete banker the country has had in its existence. And here comes this guy with a bit of an interesting background. How do you succeed? And at the time, we hadn't performed well as a business, the markets were caning us. And I developed a plan, worked hard, extremely hard to develop a plan to get the business to work well. But I must tell you, convincing the team and presenting the core ideas that the team and I would work on, I didn't think necessarily that they would be supportive. Some of them are better bankers than I am. Richard Wainwright is a great banker, somebody like Aran will, a great private banker. They would know in those areas more than I would. But again, leadership is about bringing teams together, defining a common destiny, a destination, a direction of travel, and organizing around this team having agreed what you're going for, resources, and providing the space for people to bring their talents. So I brought this team together. A lot of doubt getting the team to agree and co-develop a plan. When we went to Cape Town to see shareholders, to London to see shareholders, say here's the battle plan for the next five years, we're going to do A, B, C, D, these are the outcomes that we think we can get in five years. But so that you don't wait for five years, we will give you a medium-term milestone to measure success. So at every one of these meetings, you look into a shareholder's eye and you can only be filled with doubt. And then I remember one of the larger shareholders, they own about 7 or 8% of the business in Cape Town, a guy says, 'Man, I love the way you're talking about it. You're talking about the cost of equity and you're talking about getting a return above the cost of equity.' And the guy says, 'I like it, but goodness me, I think your plans are unrealistic.' I mean, having put a proper presentation and having been passionate about it, the guy says, 'I like it, but looks unrealistic, chum.' So at every one of those moments, you get a sense of doubt. When I left teaching at university and an older guy, somebody that I idolized, says to me, 'Are you sure this is what you want to do? You are likely to come back to me with your tail between your legs.' For me, it is absolutely natural. Anyone who tells you that they don't get doubtful, they don't get a sense of fear when they undertake a big project, they are probably being a little foreign to the truth. But what the most successful do: they prepare well, they back themselves to execute on the plan that they have in place, and they go for it. Sometimes they don't succeed. We have succeeded with the team that we have now beyond every measure that we put out in February 2019. We had what we call the capital markets day. Some of you know, let me have the elephant in the room: some of you thought that I got paid nicely last year. Just don't have to ask that question, he's just it himself. So when we agreed with our shareholders what the battle plan was, we also said if we achieve this particular outcome, you're going to reward our people this way.

A lot of that reward was tied to the share price, so we were able to get, depending on the measure you use, around four times the share price we started off with. So if you got given, as I was — and I'm not talking about this too much, I'm just trying to give you a sense of success — if you got given a million pounds, that turns into 4 million. And it feels like it's a lot of money, but it's executed on a plan. And tying your own fate and the fate of your colleagues — and by the way, all my colleagues at Investec, they didn't make the headlines, but they were all right.

You mean you were given a million and it became 4 million? Yeah, I know that's good. That's good. And that's not magic. Um, so this thing called out — lost my thought a little bit, I apologize. We'll bring you back. This thing called out today we call it imposter syndrome. Yeah. And you are using a more recent example to explain how you are navigating that doubt. So not everybody is as old as we are, you know. I see one or two people — Dr. Lamberti there is our age, you know. Mark has been kind. Most of the people here did not grow up in the world of standard; they grew up in the world of grades and they were born digital. So for them to put yourself in a 30-year-old's shoes — and so as a young person, as a 30-year-old in business in Kiso, how did you manage doubt? Because the stakes were very different there, right, compared to the stakes now. Because I think that the stakes are a bit bigger though. Well, yes, bigger, but I think the intensity was different given your age then, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, I mean, I've always taken as a North Star this idea, as I said earlier, about a set of skills that allow you — they give you a license to be at the table — and working harder than anyone else and trying to make an impact. So that's been my guiding star, as it were, in the early days of a career, because you really haven't gotten the three spheres together nicely. I encourage young people to really seek to get to a point where they reach a sense of certainty about what it is they feel is important for them and it's an area where they can make a big contribution. So in the early days, and I say this to young people, you have to guard your confidence with everything you have. If within a working environment you don't feel like you have the right level of confidence and you don't feel that the contribution you're making is either appreciated or satisfactory for you, I encourage you to move and look for something else. Because if your confidence gets destroyed, you're likely to struggle in life; the next job becomes even more difficult. So in the early years, from say 25 to about 30, 35 — that's called youth in this country, yeah, youth — so I encourage people to experiment a bit. And if they do not feel they're in the right space, they should move on. Don't let doubt and a sense of not being enough — because this is what doubt brings: 'I'm not enough for this role, I'm not good enough' — get on with it. Look for a place, look for a role where you're good enough. But you have to get, I think in your mid-30s to your 40s, you have to get to a place where you wake up in the morning with a sense of a burning passion and where you have discovered at last what it is you're good at. So find that, and that allows you to conquer the doubt. When you know what you know and what you're really passionate about, even if the mountain looks quite steep to climb, there will be something inside of you that says, 'Yeah, the mountain may be quite steep, but boy do I have it in me to conquer.' And when you still have a lot in your tank, you keep going. So doubt is — I mean, it's even at 30 it is something that should motivate you and continue to fuel you. Even today, having been as successful as we have been as Investec, we ask the question: what's next for Investec for the next five, seven years? How do we create the kind of impact and legacy that you don't need to defend?

So over the last two years, we worked on a deeper understanding of the meaning of our corporate, because I mean I've talked about returns, I've talked about pay and money. So we've had to ask what the French would call the 'raison d'être': what is your actual reason to be? Do you fulfill in society a particular specific purpose that if you were not there, your clients would miss you and they would wish you remained relevant to them? So we've asked that question for two years. We've spoken to probably more than 2,000, 3,000 of our colleagues, if not more, so that we can distill for ourselves something that binds us together as an organization. And we came up with this simple idea, really simple: that we exist to create enduring work. So we want to make a difference, we want to be long-term, and we are multistakeholder. In other words, we have a duty of care and loyalty to our people, we have a duty of care and loyalty to our clients, we have a responsibility to the environment that we reduce harm and do good, we have a duty to be ethical in how we operate, pay our taxes. And some of you will know that we have been involved in some controversy around paying taxes in Europe, and we've had to deal with that controversy, and we continue to work with the regulators out in Europe to reckon with what may have happened there. But you have to have a fundamental commitment to doing what's right as a corporate, and you have to, as our predecessor said, you have to live in society and not off it. When financial services people, bankers, fund managers, rich organizations — we've been called worse, okay — talk the talk that you are talking. The millions of South Africans that are poor, not part of the bargain, struggle to believe and to buy into that vision. Yeah. Um, how do we respond to at best the skeptical, at worst they're cynical, because they're saying all of this is marketing talk, right? You are driven by profit, you want to make as much profit, you want to be as rich as possible at our cost. Your bank charges are too high. By the way, I got this little message from one of my family saying, 'You people are quite interested in this big pay, and the question was why are bank charges so high? Is it because you're getting paid so much?' There we go, good question. So did that transformation of the one to four was that as a result of some unequal relationship that takes place between banks and their customers, between financial institutions and society? Yeah, I think this is where you have to understand the concept of enduring work. In other words, you make decisions not only for today, because you have the pressure to make profits. When we went to our shareholders in 2019, we said to them we have a five-year view around how we would turn the business around. It wasn't a quick scheme to make profits. To them equally, we said to them these are the things that are important to us. Investec used to be known for the slogan 'we live in society'. Even before we were around, we were already investing in math and science education. We are the single biggest investor in quality maths and science education in townships. Where our programs are, you can see in a province like the Free State, which we worked with for the last 10 years or so, you can see the progress in maths and science from the Free State given the investment we have made. So I think judge us by what we have done, and because we talk the way we do, hold us to account for what we do.

The poorest have been ill served by a government — I'm not going into politics, this is a safe place to criticize politicians, we won't tell them, I promise. No, I get whipped too many times for speaking my mind, but you're on a burning platform, so who cares about what they think, the politicians? Yeah. So the poor have been ill served. Our country has not done well with respect to its ability to generate dignity. And you generate dignity through providing an opportunity for people to work, for a father, a mother, a brother, a sister to have a reason to wake up in the morning to go to work and to have the pride of earning something. So the number one priority for the country should be an economic model that produces the highest number of jobs. Nobody likes the indignity of begging, the indignity of waiting for a grant at the end of the year. So I can understand when somebody is skeptical about a corporate that says we want to do good, because people have done badly. I bought myself a set of Brunello Cucinelli sneakers, and I've bought them because I love what the company does. So an Italian family, a family-owned business, they say they want a return on their investment of between 15 and 18%. Okay, if they make more than 18%, then either we are not paying our employee partners enough, or we are not paying our suppliers appropriately, or we are polluting somewhere and not doing the right thing. So at Investec, we have our return parameters bounded. We don't say we want to make more than this; we say we want to make between 12 and 16% in pound terms. If we make more than 16% in pound terms consistently, something is broken in the model. It's not just that we are smart; we probably are not paying our people well, or we're not putting enough money into society. For instance, in our schools, could we double or triple our investment in schools as an example? So yeah, the average person has had a pretty raw deal, but I'm not sure that it's folks like me that have contributed to that. I think there are basic things you can do to move the country forward. The number one priority has to be about jobs, and you have to tell whoever it is that stands in the way of creating jobs, you got to take the head off. But then you need a clear sense of what it is that you need to do to create jobs. It will be private sector led; the role of government will reduce over time. It'll be investment led. I mean, of the people that are employed, the majority, a big majority, is in the private sector. Unless you support and create an environment where investment can be made, you can kiss jobs goodbye. Absolutely. But you need a leader, a group of leaders, who will be uncompromising. While I'm not a proponent of communism — in fact, I think it's a lot of baloney if you see what — but you must have been a socialist at some point, I don't know, because they say if you're not a socialist in your 20s you don't have a heart, and if you're still a socialist in your 30s you don't have a brain. But to be a socialist, somewhere you have to be occupied with the isms. For most people, you're occupied with just the desire to get a meal, a desire to get a roof over your head, a desire for safety because criminals are running in the streets. People in Soweto, like where I live, you know, come to my table, my dinner table — 'oh crime this and that' — go to Alexandra township down the road, or go to Tembisa, where the criminals run around with no sense of ever being caught. If they get caught, they have enough money to jam the courts. Yeah. So for me, you have to deal with the fundamental problem of creating jobs in the country. You need a leadership that understands that, you need a leadership that has the backbone to say to their colleagues, 'This is the only issue that matters.'

Let's start with doubt. Um, I said I've generally used doubt as fuel to encourage me to work harder, to try to make sure that what I do is what I'm good at and I can make a contribution on. So I've always used it as fuel, and I've generally made sure that if I got to a point where my confidence gets destroyed, I make a change. So if doubt overwhelms you to a point where you feel completely immobilized, you need to listen, I think you need to reconsider what you're doing. If I look at my younger self, you have no idea how — I mean, only in around 75, 76 as a person did I get an inkling that I have certain abilities. Generally, when you grow in poverty, all that you see is depressing. There isn't any level of encouragement, there's a big struggle just to eat, just to be able to sleep peacefully. So the first time I went to Durban in my late 30s, if not early 40s, I couldn't sleep because a friend of mine — an upcoming movie maker — has a house on the beach, and the sound of waves can be terrorizing if you've lived in a shack. Because when it's very windy, the corrugated iron can fly away; you've got big stones that are keeping these things. So when you think about these moments where you come from, you literally use your past as fuel to try to propel to the future. My younger self was just too traumatized, I think, by that childhood. My slightly more developed self, as I got into the corporate world, I wish I was a bit more patient. I got to a point where I became impatient, so I would make changes too soon, even when I thought I was doing well but I felt I needed to make changes too soon. So that would be something that I would look back at and say maybe you could do that better. But I would never ever regret the fact that I was always hopeful and optimistic, coming from my father's own mindset, and disciplined to understand the sacrifice required to be successful. So those would be the kind of things: say, 'Okay boy, you did well by continuing to believe in the future,' and say, 'Goodness me, you worked hard for it. Maybe you didn't have as much fun as you could have had, but at least you worked hard.'

On freedom, I mean, how would you define freedom? Um, as an example, freedom has to include the fact that you have a life of some dignity. Freedom has to include the fact that you can walk in the street as a woman and not fear that you could be attacked and raped. Freedom must contain in it a sense that you would be treated fairly if you went and you sought justice because something didn't go right. So freedom is extremely limited; the poor really have no freedom. I know, as I said, we like to complain where Professor and I sit and go — last night I went to dinner at Hall in High Park, I mean beautiful food, and there's my friend Floyd Shivambu having a fabulous meal. I mean this place is expensive, and he didn't have his — even for bankers, right? Yeah, even for bankers, especially for — and he didn't have his red overall, and he was having a fabulous meal. I wish for every South African the opportunity to at least be able to not be given money to get a meal, but to earn a living, to be able even to go to a Kentucky and buy something that they can enjoy with their families. So I think we are not only unequal as a society, we are unfree as a society. I mean, in my case, like every bank CEO, you will have somebody that always is with you, you will have a bulletproof car. What kind of a society is this? You go to Germany, you could find — you could even meet Merkel in the street on her own. That's freedom. That is freedom. We are in prison. We have to get the country working, and it takes a government and it takes a business sector. I mean, you will know the kind of interventions that we try to make from a business perspective, whether it be in the energy sector. We have been investing hugely. When we announced our results last time, one of the businesses that grew at the highest rate is a corporate bank because we are investing in infrastructure not only here but across the continent. So we saw rates of growth that are multiples of where you would think they would be given the economic growth rate of close to zero. So there's a fair level of investment that we make on an ongoing basis. Richard Quest asked me a few — probably four weeks ago on CNN — 'Are you trying to diversify and get out of South Africa?' I said to him, 'There is a huge level of opportunity in South Africa for my business. We continue to bank even a little lower in the high-income space, both in terms of wealth and bank.' So we have a big drive, and obviously at the high net worth end where people are risk-averse in internationalizing, we have a bank in Switzerland and we continue to help them with banking and wealth with respect to them working and preserving their wealth. On the corporate side, the alternative energy space as an example, infrastructure — these are areas where we invest. But you have to have a half-decent government, and I don't think at the moment we are anywhere close to a half-decent government. Here's a challenge for most of you: if between now and May you can get 10 people to register for elections — 10, no more than 10, it's not a very big challenge — 10 people to register for elections. Let each one of us, as opposed to blaming others, take the civic duty of encouraging 10 people to vote. I tell you, the country will move forward. So it is not only on government, it is not only on business. In fact, they always say we get the government we deserve because we either don't vote or we don't take it seriously, or we vote poorly. So I think there's a level of investment that is on the go, but you need a half-decent government to be able to move forward.

We are excited about what we can do as a business and as the banking industry and as the corporate sector generally. But I'm happy to talk to you. As I said, I feel sorry for you because as you can see, there's a zest for life at the Zebra. Place risk propensity — somebody of my background has no risk aversion. I don't. I was born in abject poverty; we needed to do something to get out of it. So just a belief that you can continue to improve. So yes, we've tightened risk disciplines significantly, we've diversified our loan books, we've granularized those loan books, but we continue to be hungry for growth with a level of discipline in terms of risk management. So I'm no less hungry today than I was 60 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago. I really think we have placed in our care enormous resources, and we can do with those resources a lot. So we are investing, and for somebody in my role, we have huge responsibility to exercise this influence appropriately. As an example, just to give you one simple thing that you can do when you have a level of influence: we've increased the salaries of our lowest paid from 180,000 over the last two years to 250,000. That's what you can do when you have power — using it for good, making sure that you spread the benefit of it, making sure that you improve the conditions of people's employment. As an example, we've been reviewing all contractors. In such trouble now because I see lots of first-time job hunters thinking, 'Yo, 250? Chief, what's your email address?' So the point is the following: we have to continue to take risk, we have to continue to have a burning ambition to make a difference. And if you are in any role of influence, please don't just enjoy the benefits; think hard about what you have and how you could use that. And by the way, our returns continue to improve even though we have moved the lowest pay from 180 to 250,000. I really think that mentorship is important — just having somebody that you can talk to. When I look at my younger self, I told you that I feel that there were significant parts of my career that would have turned differently had I been a bit more patient. And generally, if you have somebody in your circle that does not try to give you answers but can ask questions — the best mentors listen and they ask questions, and you make your own decisions — I think that really is important. I wish I had strong mentors. At the moment, I don't have a mentor, but I have a shrink that I see from time to time. Because by the very nature of the work we do, you're under significant pressure. Sometimes you develop a sense of blind spots in your life, or you clog up the arteries of your mind and your heart. And I think it's important to look after your mental health. So I do see a shrink from time to time. I haven't been as disciplined in the last little while because I've been traveling a lot. I encourage everybody in the room: at least three, four times a year, see a shrink. Not because you're sick, but because you want to talk to someone who will not be judgmental, someone who's experienced, someone who will help you — whether it be something truly personal or it be something that relates to career. It's absolutely important. So what we do with Investec: we have a mental health capability to support our colleagues, and we have a huge mentoring program that goes up to the executive. We pay for mentors and we pay for mental health. I encourage everybody to do that. I try to mentor people, but I run all over the world, so sometimes it's a bit difficult.

With respect to hope — and the two questions are related — it's hard to be hopeful if you wake up in Alex in a crowded place and sometimes there's no parent to even try to give you hope. It's hard. You just have to accept it. And one of the most important things we have to do as a country is get to a place where the young don't lose any hope, because then we have no country to live for. So the work you do, the work that we have to do, is to continue to find pathways for hope. Entrepreneurship helps, but in my world, I prefer for kids to get a minimum level of education and a minimum level of experience before they can go out on their own. In my own life, I went out completely on my own at 40, because I had gained a lot of experience. I do understand that not every career will be like that. So everywhere we can sow a seed of hope — whether it be through helping somebody with a bursary, or helping them with counseling, or just giving them a sense of hope, or giving them some advice on how they could have a business to sustain themselves, even though it may be subsistence — that element of giving hope is really important. Entrepreneurship beyond a scale requires a lot more skills, I think, but we have to do a lot about township economies as well. There's a guy who runs Chopr, right, who probably knows the most about townships in the country, Peter Erasmus. He has a business that deals with payments. He can tell you how a tetin of coffee gets fractionalized in the fourth month, where somebody buys a tetin of coffee and they can sell teaspoons of coffee in terms of fractionalization. We have to understand much deeper these business models to try to give a bit more hope. But it's a long topic, a long discussion on the country. If you are not a little scared about the country, there's something wrong with you, because our trajectory is not good at all. But here's the mindset that I take: my mindset is that we have to get to a point where we know we are on a burning platform, that we have to do something and do it urgently. Our current leaders in many spheres of life don't act like we are on a burning platform, and that the fire is coming towards us unless we do it. So as an individual, as a person, as a business person, we try every single day to douse the fire, to have a ray of hope as we go. So the first thing we have to do — and I know I'm 61, I repeat myself — register to vote. That's the first thing that can create a level of hope. Once we've done that, load shed — some of these useless politicians, load shed them stage eight, take them out. Get younger people in. We are governed by guys in their late 60s and some in their 70s, no idea about how the world works. I'm actually getting a bit too old at 61 myself. So we need to try and just be civic and be active in everything we do. I think this election is important to scrape these guys out of their boots, and in some cases load shed them. Get more younger people — people like Zibi and others — they have no constituency though, but they are better in their thinking in terms of how we can move the country forward. 2029 will be critical, because if we don't get it right, then you get to a tipping point where you can easily deteriorate into a Zimbabwe where the courts don't work, where the economy doesn't work unless you are in bed with Mugabe and his cronies. We can't get there. So each one of us has to do something about it. So scared at times, but not without hope.