ENID is a term widely used, just generally not in South Africa. For some reason we didn’t import the term along with most of Solvency II. This has nothing to do with the Famous Five. While it is most common in the general insurance space, it is relevant across the spectrum of risk management and…
We’ve been in and out of recession. We’ve had more political drama than I’d like for a lifetime. We’ve had several lifetimes of obvious, unresolved corruption and fraud. We’ve had a volatile and depreciating currency by and large. This graph brought it home a little to me: Egypt, despite an Arab Spring has not experienced…
Systemic risk is risk to the “system” in some way. In the financial services world, it is often defined in one of two ways: The risk of contagion, where failure of an entity leads to distress or failures of others [micro prudential] The risk of an event that can trigger serious consequences for the real economy.…
Credit Life regulations have been live for long enough now that insurers are starting to feel the impact and the shake-up of amongst industry players is starting to emerge. There have been plenty of debate around the regulations, in part because of the dramatic financial and operational impact they will have, and partly because of…
In 2014, John Oliphant was fired from the Government Employees’ Pension Fund (GEPF) where he was principal executive officer. Â There were allegations, some details not disputed, that had Mr Oliphant accused of exceeding his powers and not following due process which amounted to, at the maximum, some hundreds of thousands of Rands. That outcome, with…
The Brookings Financial and Digital Inclusion Project measures South Africa one place behind Kenya in terms of financial inclusion. I’m still working my way through the full report, but Kenya’s score is a significant jump above South Africa and the closely contested positions below it. Is Kenya genuinely making such inroads or is this a…
I read a letter from Pali Lehohla on news24 this weekend. Lehohla, the head of StatsSA, disagreed with a report by DaMina Advisors on economic growth in South Africa during and post the apartheid era. To paraphrase Lehohla, he disagreed with their methodology, their data and their values and ethics: First, I need to engage the…
Foreign person? Foreign company? Foreign trust? Local company owned by foreigners? Local company owned partly by foreigners? Foreign company owned by locals? Local company owned by locals with debt finance from foreigners? Â Local bank with foreign shareholders and repossessed properties? Local insurance company issuing policies to foreigners? BRICS bank? Foreigner married in community of property…
