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# Fund managers have had to go offshore to run global money, and the Reserve Bank has drafted a way back
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/fund-managers-have-had-to-go-offshore-to-run-global-money-and-the-reserve-bank-has-drafted-a-way-back/
- Published: 2026-10-23T03:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T03:29:59.000Z
- Description: Draft rules from the Reserve Bank and Treasury would let approved South African firms run portfolios of foreign assets from home, and comments close on 30 November.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Policy, Business Bagel News

If a South African fund manager wants to run a portfolio of global shares for a client, the work has usually had to be done from somewhere else. Firms have had to set up management companies abroad to handle foreign-currency products, so asset management work that could be done here is based in offshore centres instead.

On Wednesday the Reserve Bank, which runs South Africa's exchange controls, put out draft rules to change that. They describe something called a Synthetic Financial Centre, and despite the name there is nothing to build. It is a new category inside the existing exchange control rules, written so that approved firms can run portfolios made up entirely of foreign assets, in foreign currency, from South Africa and under South African law.

## What a fund manager could do from home

The Bank is calling this a first phase. Approved institutions get to manage qualifying foreign portfolios and the foreign currency business that goes with them, and anything more ambitious is left for later rounds.

In practice, a local manager could administer and trade things like global shares, emerging market debt and offshore funds without opening a company abroad first. Licensed private equity managers may qualify too, and foreign firms can apply to join. Local pension funds and other large investors could then hand money to those managers using the offshore allowances they already have. South African assets held inside one of these portfolios would still count as South African for exchange control and reporting.

## Where the R10 trillion comes from

The number doing the rounds is R10 trillion. It started as former JSE chief executive Leila Fourie's estimate of how much is currently managed offshore, and the JSE now says that is how much the country could repatriate, at most. Nobody has promised that any of it will move.

The JSE has pushed hardest for this. Its chief executive, Valdene Reddy, chairs Operation Phumelela, the industry taskforce that spent two years working on the framework with Treasury and the Reserve Bank. "We developed the SFC because SA should be competing for this business, not watching it move elsewhere," Reddy said in a statement. Nedbank chair Daniel Mminele, who sits on the taskforce's steering committee, described the job as translating a sophisticated financial system "into investment, exports and jobs".

Comments on the draft close on 30 November, and Treasury and the Reserve Bank expect the rules to be in force before the end of the year. From then, setting up abroad becomes a choice for a South African fund manager, rather than the price of running global money.