1. From Deloitte Trainee to CFO
Two moments, and the second one is the bigger of the two.
The first was staying on at Deloitte as a manager. Most people leave as soon as they qualify. I stayed another two and a half years, and I stayed on the advice of a manager of mine at the time who told me to stay on and learn how to manage a team. He was right. At my busiest I was running a team of twenty-five. You do not get to do that anywhere else that early.
The second was leaving.
I wanted a deeper understanding of business from a practical side rather than an audit one. I was also tired of the travelling. I was spending more time in my car and on the phone than I wanted to, and I had a young family at home.
So in 2016 I joined Lion of Africa as financial manager. They had been my audit client.
I will be honest about what that taught me. I had audited insurers for six years and I did not really understand insurance until I was sitting inside one. Auditing a company tells you whether the numbers are right. It tells you very little about why the business made the decisions that produced them. That was the light bulb.
A little over a year later I was promoted to acting chief financial officer. The company was under real pressure at the time, so the exposure came quickly, and a lot of it was putting out fires and holding relationships together. Then it went into voluntary run-off.
Most chief financial officers learn the job in a business that works. I learned it in one that was closing. You find out quickly which numbers matter and which were only ever decoration.
On how audit shaped me, it was not the technical part.
By the end I was a manager, not a clerk. The job was people. Managing upwards to partners, sideways to colleagues and downwards to trainees, usually on the same day, and usually in somebody else’s building where I had no authority at all. That is what I carried into a finance function. Leadership is managing people, and audit taught me that long before it taught me anything useful about insurance.
The weakness is risk aversion. Audit trains you to look for what could go wrong, and it made me risk averse by nature. An asset in a regulated business. A handicap when a decision has to be made quickly and imperfectly.
2. The CFO Role in a Specialist Insurer
The hardest part was the uncertainty. Not the modelling.
Nobody knew how long it would last. Three weeks, three months, two years. We were making decisions that would matter for years without any clear view of the next six months. Waiting was not an option either. By the time the picture was clear, the moment to do anything useful about it would have passed.
The clearest example was the loan fund.
FEM’s policyholders are construction companies. When the country shut down, the sites shut down, and a lot of perfectly sound businesses simply ran out of cash. Not because they were badly run. Their income stopped overnight and their costs did not.
So in October 2020 we set up the FEM Construction Industry Loan Fund, a special purpose vehicle created as a joint venture with another insurer, to lend into exactly that gap. I played an instrumental role in getting it off the ground. The legal and regulatory work, the engagement with the Prudential Authority, the loan assessment criteria. I sat on its credit committee.
Between them, the companies we lent to employed more than a thousand people. Most were close to closing. That is the part of my time at FEM I am proudest of, and it had very little to do with reserving or reporting.
On financial resilience, two lessons, and they pull against each other.
The first is playing the long game. A crisis is not the moment to abandon the position you have built. What carried us through was decided in the years before anyone had heard of the virus.
The second is that none of that helps if you cannot pay next month. Short-term liquidity is what buys you the time to play the long game. That was true of our policyholders and it was true of us. Solvency is a position. Liquidity is a heartbeat. In a crisis you watch the heartbeat.
3. Takaful: A Growing Frontier
It started with a question I could not answer.
Someone asked me whether the cover they held was permissible for them. After more than a decade in insurance I could describe the product in detail and say nothing useful about the structure behind it.
So I did the Certified Takaful Professional designation. The honest position is that I came to it late, and as a student rather than a practitioner. My executive career has been conventional and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
On South Africa, the potential is real but not quite where people assume.
The obvious market is the Muslim community. Significant, but not large enough on its own to carry a full takaful operator. The more interesting question is whether the structure travels beyond the faith. Mutual and cooperative insurance has deep roots here, and takaful is a disciplined version of the same idea.
The barriers are practical rather than philosophical. Scale, because a pool needs volume before it works. Regulation, because our legislation was not drafted with this structure in mind and a window would take careful engineering. And distribution, which everybody underestimates because it is the least interesting part.
What is missing is not demand. It is somebody willing to carry the cost of being first.
4. Islamic vs. Conventional Insurance
The technical differences are well documented. Risk transfer against risk sharing, the separation of the participants’ fund from the operator’s fund, the treatment of surplus, the constraints on the asset side. I will not rehearse them.
The difference that actually matters is who owns the outcome.
In a conventional insurer the underwriting result belongs to the shareholder. In takaful the surplus belongs to the participants and the operator is paid to manage the pool. That one change moves the incentives all the way through the business.
What conventional insurers can learn is not a product. It is the mutual discipline. The insurer where I spent the longest as chief financial officer was a mutual, and a mutual prices differently. When the people paying the premium are the people who own the surplus, you stop asking what the market will bear and start asking what the risk costs.
The loan fund I described earlier is a mutual instinct rather than a shareholder one. You do not lend your own money to your own policyholders in a crisis unless you think of them as members.
I would not overstate it. Mutuality has its own failure modes. Without a shareholder demanding a return, capital discipline can go soft. Takaful is not automatically better governed than conventional insurance. It is differently governed. The real question is the same in both: does anybody in the room have a reason to ask the uncomfortable question?
5. Governance: From Executive to Non-Executive
The difference is not seniority. It is distance.
An executive is inside the information. You know what happened because you were in the room when it happened. A non-executive sees the version that reaches the board pack, and that version has passed through several hands on the way.
So the job changes. As chief financial officer I spent my time getting to the right answer. As an audit committee chairman I spend it working out whether the answer in front of me can be relied on, and what is not in front of me at all.
At FEM the external auditors, the internal auditors, the actuarial function, the investment consultants and the reinsurance broker all reported through me. I was the person answering the audit committee’s questions. Now I am the person asking them, at two licensed insurers in two countries. Having sat in both chairs is the most useful thing I bring.
The actuarial part took real work. Accountants and actuaries speak different languages, and early on it was easier to nod along than to admit I had not followed. I had to learn what they were actually trying to achieve and then satisfy myself that it made sense financially. That habit, not leaving the room until you understand the answer rather than the words, is most of what the job now is.
It also helps that I have written the pack. I know what gets left out and why, because I have left things out myself. Not dishonestly. A pack has a page limit and somebody has to choose. It makes me harder to satisfy with a well-presented paper.
The risk is the obvious one. A former chief financial officer on a board can end up doing the chief financial officer’s job from the wrong chair. It helps nobody, it undermines the executive, and it is a real temptation when you can see exactly how you would have solved it.
I have had to learn to ask the question and then stop talking.
6. African Risk Capacity and Climate Finance
Parametric insurance pays on a measurement, not on a loss assessment. You agree upfront what gets measured, rainfall or wind speed or seismic intensity, and what payment follows which reading. Nobody visits the site. If the trigger is met, the money moves.
For sovereign disaster risk that matters, because the value of the money is in how fast it arrives. Help that lands six months after a drought pays for recovery. Help that lands in three weeks changes what a household had to sell, or go without, in the meantime.
I should be clear about my seat. I ran finance and investment, not the modelling. The people designing the triggers are actuaries and climate scientists. My job was the money. Whether the pools were funded, whether the assets matched the liabilities, and whether the numbers put in front of member states and their partners could be relied on.
The rewarding part was seeing it work rather than seeing it modelled. Since 2014 the organisation has paid out more than two hundred and twenty-five million dollars in claims and covers over thirty million people a year. In the 2023 and 2024 drought, roughly thirty-two million dollars reached Zimbabwe through an African Union arranged pool with development finance support. That is not relief arriving late. That is a contract paying out.
The honest weakness is basis risk. The measurement can miss. A farmer loses a crop and receives nothing because a rain gauge twelve kilometres away recorded enough rain. Everybody in the field knows this. The answer is careful design, layering, and being straight with the buyer about what they have actually bought.
The bigger problem is not technical. It is conversion. You find programmes across the continent with twenty thousand registrations and fewer than a thousand paying participants. Reach is not cover, and the industry is not yet honest enough about the difference.
7. Authoring “The Bottom Line”
It started with the budget speech that did not happen.
In February 2025 the Minister of Finance postponed it. First time in thirty years of democracy. Cabinet could not agree on a VAT increase and the country waited three weeks for a revised budget. What that revealed, more than any of the numbers, was that we had a governance and coordination problem dressed up as a fiscal one. The most important financial event in the country’s year failed to deliver, not because the numbers were unworkable, but because the machinery around them was.
I wrote an article about it in May, called “South Africa Needs a CFO More Than a Finance Minister”. It was a thought experiment. What if we treated South Africa as a company and asked what a chief financial officer would do.
It was widely read. I told myself I had moved on. I had not.
Two things kept it alive.
The first was that two different people, both of whom know me well, asked me the same question within days. When is the book coming. Neither of them had been told anything. They had been reading what I was publishing all year and had noticed something unfinished before I did.
The second was a flight home from a trip abroad. Two long flights, a long layover, about twenty-four hours door to door. That much time alone in transit is unusual, and the mind wanders in a way it does not in ordinary life. Somewhere in the low hum of a long-haul cabin I had a thought I could not put down. The article is not finished. It needs to be a book.
I landed on the Friday. On the Sunday I opened my laptop and started writing. No plan, no publisher, no thesis about what a book would do for my career. Some people would call it a midlife crisis. I called it a book.
The argument is that South Africa’s problems are not mysterious. They are recognisable.
Treat the country as an enterprise. President as chief executive, ministers as the executive team, parliament as the board. The failures then look like failures any chief financial officer has seen before. Revenue that does not cover cost. Capital spent without a return test. Decisions that never convert into delivery. Accountability that stops before it reaches a person. I built it around five tests I use in businesses, which I call the CFO Levers.
The metaphor has limits and I say so in the book. A country cannot discontinue an unprofitable province. Citizens are not customers who can take their business elsewhere. Push the analogy too far and you end up recommending something efficient and inhumane.
As for what I hoped it would achieve, I did not really know at the time. I have a better answer now. A book is a stake in the ground. It says here is what I think, and here is how I have organised the thinking, and anyone can decide for themselves whether they agree. Most of us communicate in slides and board packs. Very few of us put a sustained argument on the table and let it be tested. Everything the book has done since, I discovered afterwards rather than planned for.
8. Ethics and Governance in Financial Services
I sat on a panel at the Finance Indaba a few years ago under the title “Integrity check: how do we fix a generation of unethical people?” I did not much like the question, because it assumes the problem is a type of person. In my experience it rarely is.
The persistent challenge is not people deciding to do the wrong thing. That happens, and it is the easier problem, because it is visible and there are mechanisms for it.
The harder one is the decision that is defensible on its own and indefensible as a pattern. One accommodation for a difficult client. One judgement call on a provision. A relationship that is disclosed but never quite examined. None of them is a scandal. Enough of them, all leaning the same way, becomes one.
Financial services is particularly exposed to this because so much of the work is judgement. A reserve, a valuation, an impairment. Those are ranges, not facts, and a range gives you room to be entirely reasonable in the direction that happens to suit you.
On what boards can do, I would be careful about culture programmes. Culture follows what visibly happens to people, not what is written in a code. The question that tells you most about an organisation is what happened the last time somebody senior was wrong.
The practical lever a board has is the uncomfortable question, asked in front of everybody. It works less through the answer than through showing that the question can be asked at all. If the only people ever raising concerns are internal audit and compliance, something has already been lost.
There is a line I keep coming back to. Integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching. Every governance structure we build is an attempt to compensate for the fact that we cannot always rely on that, and none of them works as well as the thing itself.
9. Building a Portfolio Career
Let me start with the part usually left out of this answer. It is harder than it looks, and a portfolio is much easier to collect than to run. Every commitment arrives as a good idea. They only become a workload together.
I use tests rather than a plan.
Does it need me specifically, or would it work with any senior person. If the second, it is usually not mine.
Does it compound. Board work makes me a better adviser because I see how decisions actually land. The writing sharpens the advisory work. The advisory work gives the writing something real to describe. Anything that feeds nothing else is a standalone cost.
Can I still say no to the next thing if I take this one. Capacity is the test I get wrong most often.
And one rule I hold firmly. I do not take work I would have to learn on somebody else’s time and money. If a matter needs a tax opinion, or a specialist I am not, it is declined at the start and referred on.
Underneath all of it is being organised, and I am borrowing that from someone else. Very early in my career I heard a chief executive give a farewell speech where he said he was not successful because he knew everything or was the smartest person in the room. He was successful because he was always the most organised. That stayed with me. I plan my year as far ahead as I can, and it is the only reason any of this is carryable.
Now the honest part. I wrote a piece a few years ago about work-life integration, mostly because I had been close enough to burnout to want to think it through properly. I took a real break, left the computer at home, took no calls. The main thing I learned was that the work carried on without me. I was not as necessary as I had assumed.
I know that, and I still default to being available. A portfolio career has no natural end to the day. That remains a problem rather than a system.
10. Advice for Aspiring Finance Leaders
Three things, and the technical part is not one of them.
Although let me say something about the technical part first, because people assume the path was smooth. It was not. I scraped through financial accounting at university on thirty-five percent, deregistered from the subject, repeated a year, and then failed honours and had to repeat the whole course. I went to a senior lecturer and told him I wanted to move to a university where I could study part time while working. He told me not to. I stayed, and I passed the board exam first time.
So when I say the technical part is not what matters most, I am not saying it as somebody for whom it came easily.
Learn the business, not the accounts. This is the one I got wrong. I audited insurers for six years and did not understand insurance until I worked inside one. Most finance people can tell you what the numbers were. Fewer can tell you why the business makes money and what would stop it. A board does not need another person who can read the statements. It needs somebody who understands what produces them.
Take the job that teaches you people. I stayed on at Deloitte as a manager for exactly that reason, on somebody else’s advice, and it was the best career decision I made. You will not get another chance to run teams that size that early.
Learn to be wrong in public. Technical training rewards being right, and by the time you qualify, being right has become part of who you think you are. Board work needs something else. A position held firmly, tested openly, and changed when the evidence changes.
And the one I am still working on. I default to telling rather than asking. Finance training does that to you. The people who make the move from technical expert to decision maker well are the ones who learned to ask the question first.