Most fund managers sell you their judgement: a team that picks the shares it thinks will beat the market. Satrix sells the opposite. Its funds track an index, buying the shares in it so that investors get the market's return rather than trying to beat it.
South Africans are buying it. Satrix took R13 billion of net retail inflows, the money coming in minus the money going out, in the first half of 2026, more than any other manager. Sanlam showed the numbers at its capital markets day in October.
By Sanlam's count, that came to about a quarter of all retail money flowing into South African unit trusts in the half, leaving out fund-of-funds, money market funds and reinvested returns. Of the total, R7 billion went into exchange-traded funds, index funds that trade on the JSE like a share, and R6 billion into unit trusts.
Satrix's 38%, and what it measures
Sanlam's presentation puts Satrix's share of the collective investment market, the pooled funds better known as unit trusts, at 38%. It also makes Satrix the largest index-fund business in the country, with more than R330 billion under management.
The stock pickers Sanlam sold
Two years ago Sanlam sold its active asset management businesses in South Africa and the UK, the stock pickers, to Ninety One. About R400 billion of assets moved across in that deal, and the Sanlam group took a 12.5% stake in Ninety One. Sanlam's own slide measures the flow momentum from that deal onwards.
What Sanlam Investments kept is a group of four businesses: Satrix, a multi-manager business, an alternative investments arm and private wealth. Chief executive Carl Roothman told investors the four brought in more than R200 billion of net client money over six years, R108 billion of it through Satrix.
He said Satrix is central to the areas where Sanlam believes it has "a right to win": index funds, private wealth and alternative investments. It is also taking the funds further afield, into Botswana in July, a year after listing one on the Nairobi Securities Exchange.
Add the multi-manager business and Amplify, and Sanlam Investments took 52% of the industry's retail flows in the half. The business it sold to Ninety One is not in that number.
