Sanlam Investments finished moving nearly R400bn of assets to Ninety One on 2 February, formalising a partnership the two managers first announced in 2024. It kept more than R1.2 trillion, so this is less a retreat than a decision about which parts of the job it still wants to do.
The trigger was a rule change. In 2022 the government amended Regulation 28 of the Pension Funds Act, which governs where retirement money may be invested, lifting the offshore limit from 30% to 45%. Chief executive Carl Roothman told News24 that Sanlam read this as a sign that serious money was going to leave the country, and that catching those flows needed a genuinely strong offshore manager. It looked at buying one, building one and outsourcing to one, then partnered with Ninety One, which runs about 184bn pounds, or R4 trillion, more than half of it outside Africa.
Index funds, and how far behind we are
Roothman is backing two things with what stayed. The first is index tracking, where Satrix already holds more than 40% of the South African market. The room is in how small that market still is. Index products account for about 11% of the money in South African unit trusts, where the United States went past 50% in 2024. His own caveat is that this kind of growth moves with the market rather than ahead of it.
The cheque size problem
The one he backs harder is private credit, which is lending to companies outside the banking system, and he wants it built as an emerging-market strategy rather than a South African one. The reason is the size of the cheques. Large allocators in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia are not interested in writing $10m or $20m. They want to place $200m or $300m and have it be 5% or 10% of a portfolio, and a fund limited to South Africa cannot absorb that.
This is where Roothman thinks a large insurer has the edge, because Sanlam can seed a fund with its own long-term money, co-invest, and pull other capital in behind it. He calls that the group's biggest competitive advantage right now. The sector he names is green hydrogen, a clean fuel made by splitting water using electricity from wind or solar. South Africa has sun, wind and land, Europe needs another supplier, and that combination is where he wants Sanlam to be big.
