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Insurers don't need to own banks, banks don't need to own insurers, and SA doesn't need more banks, writes Renée Bonorchis.
It's 25 years since Mike Levett, the Old Mutual CEO and chairperson in the late '90s, decided to take the group down the path of demutualisation and move its primary listing to London. By 2001, he had handed the CEO role over to Jim Sutcliffe, who then went on an expansion spree to make what we all thought was an insurer, which also controlled the old Nedcor, into an integrated financial services group with as much global reach as he could muster.
The expansion included a costly hostile takeover of Sweden's Skandia, bolstering operations in the US, spreading out in Europe, picking up tech assets, creating a joint venture in India, overseeing the merger of Nedcor's Permanent Bank and Old Mutual Bank to form a new lender aimed at the retail mass market, and managing what had been Skandia's assets in faraway climes, including South America and Australia. All of this amounted to a lot of shareholder money going into a wide variety of endeavours.
