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Why invest

Investors require three things from us

Growth – Resilience – Returns
We allocate our resources to support the sustainable delivery of our strategy, which enables us to meet our clients’ expectations

Growth, Resilience and Returns

Focusing on our clients will enable us to compete, grow and achieve scale in all our chosen markets.

We will continue to safeguard the deposits our clients entrust to us and the capital our shareholders invest in us.

Driving higher returns by optimally deploying the resources required to drive growth.

1. Partnering high growth clients

Our key differentiators are:

  • Our proven ability to successfully defend our leading market shares in South Africa.
  • Our on-the-ground presence in 20 countries across sub-Saharan Africa with deep local knowledge and a fit-for-purpose franchise.
  • Our access to pools of capital through our presence in international markets, enabling our clients to fulfil their growth ambitions.
  • Our track record of growing earnings faster than the nominal GDP in the countries in which we operate by partnering high-growth clients in targeted markets.
  • Our modern core banking systems, which enables increasing digitisation and delivery of a better client experience.
  • Our ongoing investment in strong leadership and passionate people, the most critical determinant of our long-term success.
  • Our strategic partnership with ICBC,which provides us with an opportunity to provide financial services to clients operating in the China-Africa corridor

2. Demonstrating through-the-cycle resilience

  • Our strong and liquid balance sheet which assists us in weathering cyclical downturns.
  • Our well-diversified businesses,by client,sector, product and geography, which provide good return profiles.
  • Our strategic focus on acquiring quality clients across our franchises, underpinned by clearly defined and dynamic risk appetite allocations, enables us to effectively manage our risk profiles.
  • Our well-developed and independently assured governance and risk management frameworks enable us to limit losses and reputational damage, and balance short- and long-term value creation imperatives.

3. Driving higher returns

  • Our focus on efficient allocation of capital.
  • Our delivery of operational excellence and productivity.
  • Maintaining a CLR within 80 to 100bps.
  • Driving revenue growth faster than growth in costs.
  • Accelerating the digitisation of the group to ensure and enhance our competitiveness.
  • Making further changes to the group’s architecture to become a more universal financial services organisation.
  • Assisting Liberty to recover.
  • Supporting faster, more inclusive and more sustainable economic growth and human development in South Africa and throughout the continent.
Managing our risks

We aim to instil conscious risk-taking across the group. We take a holistic and forward-looking view of the risks we face by continually assessing current and emerging risks. Our risk appetite is regularly reviewed, in response to changes in our operating context, and our exposures are managed accordingly.

Emerging Risks

TECHNOLOGY

The inability to manage, develop and maintain secure, agile technology assets to support strategic objectives.

Risk Drivers

  • A multi-channel digital experience means more technology to keep relevant, up-to-date and safe from cyber fraud attacks.
  • New types of devices span an extremely wide range of security requirements and have very different security postures.

Mitigants

  • Dedicated combined development, security and operational teams focus on speeding up implementation of projects and changes.
  • Continual testing of technology and applications to identify and rectify potential weaknesses that can be exploited by cybercriminals.
CYBER

The risk of financial loss, disruption or damage to reputation from breaches or attacks on transaction sites, systems or networks.

Risk Drivers

  • Remote presence technologies may increase the avenues for attack.
  • Increasing number and sophistication of cybercrime incidents globally.

Mitigants

  • Use of adaptive cybersecurity which uses a combination of artificial intelligence and other methods to dynamically shift tactics and detect and remove threats as quickly as possible.
  • Multi-factor authentication integrated into all critical payment applications and end-user devices.
  • 24/7 cybersecurity operation centres have improved monitoring capabilities to address evolving cyber vulnerabilities and attacks.
REGULATORY IMPACT

The risk of reputational and financial losses due to the inability to comply with or keep abreast of regulatory requirements.

Risk Drivers

  • Changing regulatory and supervisory requirements are resource intensive and costly.
  • Public interest, social drivers and consumerism may initiate legislative change, requiring appropriate response strategies.

Mitigants

  • Ongoing engagement with government and regulators to support  evidence-based policymaking and dialogue between public and private sectors.
  • Monitoring of international developments, learnings and benchmarks to identify future supervisory focus areas.
FRAUD

The risk of regulatory sanction and reputational and financial losses due to fraud, crime and misconduct from staff or syndicates.

Risk Drivers

  • Increasingly advanced cyber and malware attacks are expected, which may result in increased fraud.
  • Aggressive advancements in technology may cause unforeseeable fraud threats.

Mitigants

  • Enhanced digital detection capability covering people, processes and technology.
  • Development of predictive fraud detection and prevention capabilities using agile methodologies.
INFORMATION

The risk of loss due to inaccurate data, data breaches or being unable to protect client
information.

Risk Drivers

  • Perpetrators and events will continue to evolve.
  • There may be increased demand for processing of information from data
    subjects.

Mitigants

  • Ongoing awareness encourages a consistent information protection culture.
  • Ongoing research and threat intelligence to stay abreast of developments and to ensure the protection of information assets.
PEOPLE

The risk of failure of the workforce to adequately and efficiently serve clients, support operations and deliver business strategy.

Risk Drivers

  • The multi-generational workforce has different needs, expectations and aspirations, increasing complexity in the workplace.
  • A rise in digitisation and automation will deliver efficiencies and reduce demand for certain skillsets.

Mitigants

  • A range of learning and development solutions ensure that employees can adapt and remain relevant in the changing work environment through
    continuous learning.
  • Recognition programmes support a culture where success is celebrated and employees feel valued for their contribution to the business.
BUSINESS DISRUPTION

The risk of infrastructure/change failure or environmental impacts disrupting the services to and of the group.

Risk Drivers

  • Voluminous and/or significant system changes always pose the risk of unforeseen consequences or disruption to clients and business activities.
  • Reliance on infrastructure such as water and power utilities, and network service providers.

Mitigants

  • Continue to improve our system production stability and reliability to minimise disruption of digitally enabled services to our clients.
  • Business continuity plans are prepared for all business areas.
  • Simplify our IT landscape to improve agility, enhance customer experience
    and ensure the relevance of services we offer to our clients.
THIRD-PARTY

The risk of losses or disruptions due to ineffective management of third-party relationships.

Risk Drivers

  • Emergence of third-party partnerships and outsourcing as business enablers, for example, partnering with fintechs.
  • The potential for unknown fourth- and fifth-parties supporting third-party
    providers.

Mitigants

  • Predictive profiling of suppliers to drive improved supply chain management.
  • Increased visibility into fourth- and fifth-parties to ensure accountability and preparedness to avoid potential incidents.
CONDUCT

The risk of harm being caused to the group, its clients and markets due to inappropriate execution of business activities.

Risk Drivers

  • Cultural misalignment due to inappropriate ethics, behaviours and values being applied that result in poor business practices.
  • Growth in the complexity of regulatory frameworks.

Mitigants

  • By driving a culture of doing the right business the right way, we will continue to embed our desired values, ethics and behaviours.
  • Continuing to refine our approach to training through the rollout of more interactive and digital methods of training that are standardised across the group.
  • Working to embed and monitor conduct-related metrics in business units and corporate functions across the group.