In a market where valuation discipline often plays second fiddle to momentum plays and narrative froth, financial services specialist Nutun (formerly Transaction Capital) remains a mispriced orphan — cast adrift by its parent, scorned by the street, and quietly acquired by those who know better.
One quiet admirer is 36One Asset Management, whose rising stake in the company signals more than just optimism. It suggests conviction.
While retail sentiment lingers on Transaction Capital’s wreckage, 36One’s 6.48% stake is a vote of confidence in a turnaround the market has yet to price.
The journey of Nutun since its separation from Transaction Capital in early 2025 reads like a case study in disciplined reinvention. Stripped of the conglomerate clutter, the company has carved out a dual-core identity. On the one side, there is Nutun South Africa, which has entrenched itself as a dominant player in the distressed debt ecosystem. It’s not a business for the faint-hearted, but it generates thick yields from a R4.35bn book. It thrives in the shadows of financial distress, turning nonperforming loans into monetised assets.
On the other flank stands Nutun International, a lean and rapidly scaling business process outsourcing (BPO) platform. With operations spread across the UK, US and Australia — and execution rooted in South Africa — it delivers operational leverage by exploiting cost arbitrage and time zone alignment. It’s a model that rewards execution over expansion.
What remains at Nutun is a capital-light, structurally advantaged operation with enviable unit economics and an increasingly focused mandate.
What remains at Nutun is a capital-light, structurally advantaged operation with enviable unit economics and an increasingly focused mandate
Today, Nutun’s leadership is built around continuity and aligned capital. CEO Jonathan Jawno, a co-founder of Transaction Capital, remains central. Though his past includes roles in the group’s expansion era — including its eventual overreach — his current position is operational, not strategic.
Alongside him, directors such as Albertinah Kekana, Diane Radley and Sharon Wapnick form a board that blends institutional knowledge with capital discipline.
Importantly, this is not a team insulated from risk. Public disclosures confirm that Nutun’s directors and senior executives collectively hold 120-million shares, or 15.32% of the issued stock. Notably, many of these shares are pledged against finance facilities, introducing another layer of leverage awareness.
Their alignment is clear: this is not a salaried management team optimising for base bonuses. Their wealth is on the line, making them far more like owners than operators.
Still, history casts a long shadow. Transaction Capital’s downfall offers a cautionary tale: about empire-building, overconfidence, and the blind spots of scale. For Jawno and others with legacy ties, the imperative is not just reinvention — it’s restraint.
Nutun emerged from restructuring saddled with debt. The balance sheet reveals a company fighting to earn its way out of a leveraged past. Cash and equivalents amount to R118m, offset by R457m in bank overdrafts and more than R3.4bn in interest-bearing liabilities. Add lease liabilities of R395m and there is a net debt figure brushing R4.14bn.
The company did report a R58m profit from discontinued operations, but that was a one-time clearing of the books, not a recurring income stream. Strip out the noise and what emerges is sustainable, recurring earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (ebitda) in the R610m-R700m range. This translates to an enterprise value (EV):ebitda multiple of between 7.3 and 8.4, with leverage ratios that demand operational discipline.
To most, those numbers scream caution. To 36One, they whisper “leverage flywheel”. Because here’s the principle: when debt is fixed and operating income grows, equity compounds faster than EV. Nutun’s capital structure is not a burden; it’s a mechanism. If Nutun can sustain R600m-plus in free cash flow and commit to deleveraging over the next six to eight years, net debt could fall by more than R3bn. With EV held constant, equity value could quadruple or more. That’s how you generate returns of up to 10 times: not through blue-sky rerating, but through mechanical value transfer.
So why does the market continue to look past Nutun? It remains chained to the emotional debris of Transaction Capital’s collapse. Its current financials are clouded by IFRS 5 restatements, accounting impairments, and discontinued operations that obscure rather than clarify.
But 36One isn’t weighed down by legacy. It is pricing in something else: the recovery of collections in a market still ripe with delinquency, the margin-resilient expansion of BPO and the slow grind of deleveraging. It sees a business capable of generating sustained free cash flow, refinancing its debt stack and gradually transferring value from creditors to equity holders.
So what needs to happen? The debt portfolio must be monetised at a clip that exceeds write-offs. The BPO engine must grow without conceding its margin edge. Annual free cash flows of R500m-R700m must be sustained.
And crucially, the debt burden must shrink — not in headline restructurings, but in cold, hard repayments.
Most importantly, Nutun must resist its own past. There is no room for empire-building or lateral acquisitions. This is an execution game, not a strategy reboot. Do that, and the equity doesn’t just appreciate — it explodes.
* This article has been updated to correctly state Jonathan Jawno’s title as CEO and remove mention of Mark Herskovits, who resigned as a director in March 2025. The article erroneously stated that the company has operations in Mauritius; this has been corrected. The figure relating to profit from discontinued operations has also been corrected from R753m to R58m.
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