Ninety One Limited

Part four of Fintech Forward: RegTech Regulatory Technology.

This week, Ninety One, a global investment manager overseeing roughly one hundred and eighty-four billion pounds in assets, selected the compliance technology firm, Finergo.

To power a major stage of its digital transformation, and the scope here is pretty ambitious.

The partnership brings know-your-customer checks, customer due diligence, enhanced due diligence, and transaction monitoring together onto a single unified platform for the first time.

That platform will support Ninety One's client base across South Africa, the UK, and Luxembourg, three jurisdictions with meaningfully different compliance expectations.

Instead of juggling a patchwork of disconnected systems, the firm expects one consolidated view of client relationships, risk exposure, and financial crime indicators.

Ninety One specifically pointed to Finergo's agentic AI capabilities as the deciding factor, technology built to automate routine operational tasks and speed up decision-making.

The rollout happens in stages, building what both companies call a scalable operating model with room for future innovation.

Microsoft's broader research makes the point that AI leadership will increasingly be about depth rather than novelty, and I think that's quite clear, embedding these tools into everyday workflows rather than just producing impressive pilots.

It was interesting when I was chatting to the CEO of Ninety One, Hendrik du Toit, recently.

He still said that we're probably more in the impressive pilots phase than really embedding it just yet through the country's largest asset manager.

So what does depth look like inside an actual company from where you sit at Microsoft, Ravi?

And then I think, "Well, what about inflation? What are the implications, both short, medium, and long term?" And when I think of inflation, I think of other factors as well, and one of the factors that keeps on cropping up is a weather phenomenon called El Niño.

With me now is Nicolas Jacquier, portfolio manager at Ninety One in London, to talk about this subject and its implications.

Nicolas, it's, it's something that I came across first in 1988, when the cry was, in the trading pits of Chicago, "Beans in the teens." In other words, soybeans going to forty- 13, 14, $15 per bushel.

And it keeps on reoccurring, but apparently it's gonna be even stronger this time.

Yes, exactly.

So some emerging markets are more equal than others.

Where does this leave you as a portfolio manager? How are you positioning yourselves at Ninety One because of everything you've just said?

Yeah, so we are relatively, you know, cautious on, uh, some of the Southeastern, uh, Southeast Asian, um, economies, not purely, you know, driven by El Niño impact, but, um, you know, some of the macro drivers we weren't that positive on, and that's just something that compounds that.

[laughs]

But, um, uh, yeah, um, uh, Dorpstraat was really, you know, think of Investec with Investec Bank and, and Ninety One.

My thinking at the time, we, we owned Do- uh, Retail Africa.

In fact, the three guys that started the Dorpstraat owned 75% of Retail Africa at the time.

The Markets.

Chris Stewart, portfolio manager at Ninety One.

Chris, good evening.

Well, obviously very strong results from DRDGold.

Anthropic filed its listing papers confidentially in June and has not commented.

And lastly, Sanlam Investments handed nearly 400 billion rand of stock-picking money to Ninety One back in February and still manages more than 1.2 trillion rand.

Now, Chief Executive Carl Ruthmann told News 24 what triggered this rethink was this 2022 r- rule change that lifted how much of a retirement fund can go offshore from 30% to 45%.

He sees growth now in index funds, which holds about 11% of South African unit trust money against more than half in the United States, as well as private lending packaged for global investors.

We're gonna take a look at that and see what those potential governance concerns, uh, could mean for that business.

Then we also have a conversation with the team at Ninety One, taking a look at the South African bond market and how it is that investors have been looking at that landscape.

And we have a conversation with Merchant West, taking a look at artificial intelligence winners and losers in the market.

While we're looking at artificial intelligence, we're gonna take a look from a personal finance standpoint on the role that you should be assigning to artificial intelligence in your investment making decisions.

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