The rather grim Old Mutual head office in Pinelands has freshened up. To reflect the post-Covid realities, about half the office space has been let to third parties. The canteen, which served everything with the same unidentifiable white sauce, has closed. Even the interview rooms, which previously resembled police interrogation rooms, now have windows to the outside world.
New CEO Jurie Strydom has palatial premises on the top floor, with panoramic views of the entire Cape Town metro — and his own braai area, formerly used for corporate entertainment. Strydom plans to start sharing it with CFO Casper Troskie and possibly other members of the C-suite. At least the grim portraits of past Old Mutual chairs (they were all men) have been taken down from outside his office.
Strydom took over in May this year from Iain Williamson. His predecessor’s main decision was to set up OM Bank. Rival assurer Sanlam has opted not to set up its own bank, but to work with an associated business, TymeBank, instead. OM Bank has only just opened for business.
Strydom’s first important acquisition has been the index fund manager 10X, previously owned by Old Mutual Private Equity.
Strydom says 10X was operated completely independently of Old Mutual’s investment product and platforms. “We have an established index fund business within the Old Mutual Investment Group, but that is focused on the institutional [pension fund] market.”
Old Mutual to date has not competed with Sanlam’s Satrix offering, South Africa’s largest ETF business. The bulk of Satrix’s assets track passive indices such as the JSE top 40.
Fund manager 10X will be Old Mutual’s offering in this market. Strydom says it will target both the intermediated market — distributing through its tied agents and independent financial advisers — and the direct market, competing with EasyEquities.
Strydom was recruited in spite of spending a large chunk of his career at Sanlam. He was even brought up in Bellville and earned a Sanlam bursary. But English is his first language. He matriculated from Settlers High School and studied at the University of Cape Town.
Strydom worked in the trenches at Sanlam as head of broker services, marketing Sanlam products to independent financial advisers; historically Sanlam (and Old Mutual) relied predominantly on tied agents for sales.
Later he took over the core business at Sanlam, Sanlam Personal Finance, which eventually morphed into the Sanlam Long-Term Savings (LTS) cluster, which includes retail life insurance and the employee benefits business.
It’s no accident that Strydom has replicated the LTS structure at Old Mutual. He has appointed Prabashini Moodley to lead this cluster. She was appointed head of Old Mutual Corporate (Employee Benefits) in 2019.
Strydom says that while this might look as though the business has been centralised, in fact the underlying entities now have end-to-end responsibility for running their businesses. The IT team at the centre, for example, is substantially smaller as staff have been moved into the business units.
I would have to set aside a full week before board meetings to get up to speed
— Jurie Strydom
LTS includes most of the cash cows at the group. Corporate still has a large legacy pension fund smoothed bonus business and the largest pension fund umbrella business in South Africa. In the six months to June 2025, Corporate’s operating profit increased 8% to R1.15bn.
Another successful business in LTS is the Mass & Foundation cluster (previously known as group schemes), the national market leader in funeral policies. And this is in spite of the growth of Capitec’s funeral policies and the threat from Sanlam after it acquired Assupol, a leading provider of funeral and life insurance in the mass market.
Sanlam’s core Personal Finance book is mature; many people have been contributing every month for 30 years or more to their life policies. It is by some distance the largest contributor to group operating profit. Its contribution was up 33% in the group interims to R1.84bn.
After a quarter of a century in corporate life, Strydom tells the FM that he has been happy with his more low-key life as chair of the Common Good charity and nonexecutive chair of fintech FSPHub. To keep his hand in with mainstream life insurance, he was also a nonexecutive director of Old Mutual and became familiar with the business by studying the board papers intensively.
“I would have to set aside a full week before board meetings to get up to speed,” he says. Even though Old Mutual is out of favour on the JSE, with a market cap about a third of Sanlam’s and below that of young pretenders such as Discovery and Outsurance, it still has 7.5-million clients in South Africa alone, with a further 3.9-million in the rest of Southern Africa and 2.3-million in East and West Africa.
But with operating profit of less than R600m in the rest of Africa, it cannot claim to be a pan-African experience to anything like the same extent as Sanlam, now in a joint venture with German mammoth Allianz.
After Williamson stepped down as CEO, Strydom quickly became the bookies’ favourite to take the job. All the fancied internal candidates ruled themselves out. There was a narrow field anyway. Actuaries are the logical people to run life offices, just as chartered accountants are the logical candidates to run banks.
Strydom is certainly not the stereotypical grey-shoed Sanlam actuary with trademark green pen. As well as his time at Sanlam, Strydom spent a year at one of the world’s top actuarial consultants, Bacon & Woodrow, in London (now merged into Aon Hewitt). He has an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a CFA charter holder. He has also been CEO of Alexforbes Life and Regent Life.
It’s hard to believe that Strydom would turn down the opportunity to take over the sick man of South African life insurance. “There is no doubt that there is an extra challenge as there needs to be change at Old Mutual,” says Strydom.
At the beginning of his career in 1998, Old Mutual had a dominant market share. Now it has fallen to fifth position in its original business of recurring premium life insurance. The market is much more competitive than it was in 1999, when Old Mutual listed in both London and Joburg and chair Mike Levett settled into plush premises in Berkeley Square, in London’s Mayfair district.
It’s not only an energised Sanlam and Momentum providing intense competition. Old Mutual also has to face entrepreneurial businesses such as Discovery Life and Hollard.
Liberty, though it has lost some dynamism now that it is a rounding error in the Standard Bank group accounts, remains a significant competitor too, especially in Gauteng.
Old Mutual still faces a sceptical market. Its capital allocation was notoriously bad in the ill-fated international acquisition strategy from its listing in 1999 until its management separation in 2018, when it unbundled Nedbank as well as its well-managed UK wealth management business, which was renamed Quilter and remains listed on the JSE.
Strydom says he wants people to see Old Mutual as far more than a life office.
At the interims, the second-highest contributor was Old Mutual Insure (previously Mutual & Federal), where earnings surged 71% to R1.32bn. This can be a volatile business, with a weather event such as a hailstorm reducing earnings materially. Nonetheless, Insure is becoming a serious competitor to market leader Santam in higher-margin specialist businesses. These lines are more attractive than commodity motor insurance, where Outsurance dominates.
Strydom isn’t giving much away about the future of Old Mutual Investments. Its earnings were up a solid 9% to R592m. It has two first-class businesses in its alternatives business (private equity and infrastructure) and its fixed income business, Futuregrowth Asset Management.
Strydom says that, like Williamson, he is taking a close look at the future of Old Mutual Investment Group, the traditional active equity and multi-asset (balanced) unit.
It’s an option for Old Mutual to sell this business and its book of business to an independent fund manager. This would follow the example of Sanlam Investment Management, which was sold to the London- and Joburg-listed fund manager Ninety One. But nothing has been announced.
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