As the number of talented black professionals increases in SA, it is certainly a cause for celebration. But it also shows how far the investment management industry still needs to go, as it woefully lags behind the progress in industries such as the media. Most leading publications in SA, including the FM, now have black editors, but there are still only a handful of black CEOs and chief investment officers.
Figures provided by Renaissance Asset Management (a rare example of a fund manager where most shareholders and professional staff are black) are not encouraging.
Just four of the top 20 fund managers have black CEOs, only one has a black chief investment officer and just three have a black shareholding of more than 50% - and those three manage less than 4% of industry assets.
| WHAT IT MEANS
 Slow increase in number of blacks
No formal training or articles offered
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The ranks of unit trust portfolio managers remain pale and male, as just 6% of domestic unit trusts are managed or comanaged by black portfolio managers. Renaissance (see "Reluctant asset managers") is still the exception, particularly when it comes to African role models. The acid test will be whether pension funds and multimanagers will provide the business to attract substantial assets, rather than small black economic empowerment (BEE) allocations.
Kagiso Asset Management has recently made the leap out of the BEE fringe with appointments from, among others, Investment Solutions and the Metal Industries funds. It now manages R8bn. Roland Greaver was the founder of the business in 2002, and its first head of new business, after time as an analyst and portfolio manager at Sanlam and Gryphon. He was promoted to CEO last year.
Umbono Fund Managers, headed by Tendai Musikavanhu, also looks as though it has broken through from the fringes.
Oasis was the first black-owned business to get out of the BEE pigeonhole, and Adam Ebrahim, while he was still at Allan Gray, arguably became SA's first "star" black fund manager. In recent years he has become much more media shy and often seems to be positioning Oasis as the preferred manager for the entire Muslim world, with limited interest in the SA domestic market.
Most of the more prominent black people in the industry are still in the general management and business development area. They include Public Investment Corp CEO Brian Molefe; his chief operating officer, Albertinah Ngwezi; Metropolitan Asset Managers MD Abel Sithole; Investec Asset Management deputy MD Thabo Khojane; and, in particular, Old Mutual investment cluster head Thabo Dloti.
Dloti has pipped Molefe to the top spot, primarily because he has been more of a newsmaker.
Dloti, now that he has taken responsibility for unit trusts, has a much larger staff complement than the PIC (Old Mutual always owned a bigger share of the JSE) and he has the biggest challenge - he will be responsible for splitting up Old Mutual Asset Managers (OMAM).
Though he once derided it as a "flogger of burial policies", Dloti (37) is one of Old Mutual's leading young managers.
To rejuvenate the sales and marketing for the new investment cluster, he has brought back Derrick Msibi from OMAM's exciting but relatively peripheral private equity activities to spearhead distribution for the investment cluster.
There were a few steps backwards during the year. The predominantly black team at Abvest was disbanded after parent Absa decided to move the business to Johannesburg. But the former Abvest MD Sam Houlie did not take long to resurface at Investec Asset Management, where he runs its new Cautious Managed fund.
And we said goodbye to Alliance Capital chief investment officer Greg Eckersley, who moved to New York after the business was sold to Investec.
Godwin Sepeng stepped down as the manager of the high profile Old Mutual Top Companies unit trust, but this is not necessarily a step backwards. By January, he could be managing his own boutique as he is currently building up OMAM's offerings in what is described as "the aggressive absolute return space".
The senior black portfolio manager at OMAM remains Patrick Ntshalintshali, who manages the Old Mutual Industrial Fund and is one of the key managers of the life company's equity portfolio.
From left: Patrick Mamathuba, Hlelo Giyose, Victor Mphaphuli, Thobelani Maphumulo and Romeo Makhubela
The most glamorous new arrival to the fund management industry has been Nazmeera Moola, who was poached from Merrill Lynch to become the head of business development and part-time chief economist at African Harvest. Moola was a protégée of Merrill Lynch's award-winning economist Jos Gerson and also spent time with the firm's emerging markets team in London.
But this year one of the industry's most seasoned black stars, Imtiaz Ahmed also returned. After a spell in private equity, Ahmed has returned to become chief investment officer of multimanager Investment Solutions.
He says that so far he finds picking managers even more difficult than picking shares, but his experience in the fund management trenches brings considerable credibility to his dealings with managers.
Another returnee, at least to the private sector, is Hlelo Giyose, who has joined Stanlib, where he is spearheading the value franchise. Giyose used to comanage the Investec Growth Fund, but he converted to the value camp when he ran the Industrial Development Corp 's equity portfolio.
Expect to see and hear a lot more of Giyose, with his distinctive shiny grey suit and tie and an accent that betrays his education at the University of New Hampshire.
It is apparent that Stanlib has made the most progress of all the large managers in developing black, and particularly African, talent. Patrick Mamathuba, home-grown at Stanlib after a short spell at the Reserve Bank is now chief investment officer.
Romeo Makhubela and Thobelani Maphumulo make up half of the multi-asset team (running what we used to call balanced mandates). There is a pipeline of young talent in research, dealing and quants, which will appear in future reports.
One name that is already breaking through is Victor Mphaphuli, who is the main back-up for Stanlib's award-winning bond fund manager Henk Viljoen.
It is also good to see that an equally noisy bond manager, Andrew Kantor at Futuregrowth, has also given space for a protégé in the shape of Kelebogile Moloko, who runs the Infrastructure Bond Fund and plays a prominent role in the management of the nongovernment bonds, or credits.
All businesses are taking the appointment of senior black staff more seriously - this year Delphine Govender and Mahesh Cooper were both appointed directors of Allan Gray.
The creation of black staff trusts should help to keep black talent in their firms and in the industry in general. At Coronation blacks are steadily becoming more prominent. Pallavi Ambekar was appointed co-head of the Coronation Industrial Fund (her husband Rajay Ambekar is the portfolio manager of the new African Harvest Mastermind Fund). Hugo Nelson has established himself as one of the leading portfolio managers in the Coronation team after winning awards for the Resources Fund and the Top 20 Fund.
Two of the key business executives at Coronation are black - Kirshni Totaram, the head of business development, and chief operating officer Anton Pillay, who was recruited in late 2005 from BoE Private Clients.
The other business with a black staff trust, Prudential, now has two black portfolio managers, Cromwell Mashengete, an equity manager, and Somshini Packirisamy, the manager of the money market fund. Doc Sethole, its director of business development, is one of the old hands in the business.
It is often difficult for black people to get into the fund management industry because it does not have a formal system of training and articles.
Programmes such as RMB's investment academy play a vital role: it receives more than 100 applications for every place. One of the graduates of the programme, Lerato Molefe, a qualified chemical engineer, has been appointed co-head of the RMB Property Fund.
