by Ekrem Duman | Aug 25, 2026 | South Africa Banking & Finance, South Africa Company Stories
⚡ TL;DRThe Johannesburg Stock Exchange is Africa’s dominant capital market, among the world’s best-regulated, and steadily shrinking — its listed company count has roughly halved since the 1990s as the largest firms moved primary listings...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 25, 2026 | South Africa Banking & Finance, South Africa Company Stories
⚡ TL;DRNedbank is South Africa’s fourth large bank, historically the strongest in commercial property and wholesale lending, majority-owned by Old Mutual for two decades before an unbundling that made it independent, and now the country’s most...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 25, 2026 | South Africa Banking & Finance, South Africa Company Stories
⚡ TL;DRAbsa spent a decade inside Barclays and then had to rebuild itself when the British bank retreated from Africa — replacing systems, brand, treasury operations and technology while competitors took share, in the most complete corporate separation in...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 25, 2026 | South Africa Banking & Finance, South Africa Company Stories
⚡ TL;DRFirstRand was built by a small group of entrepreneurial bankers who turned a merchant bank into South Africa’s most valuable banking group, running FNB, RMB and WesBank as distinct businesses with distinct cultures under a holding company whose main...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 25, 2026 | South Africa Banking & Finance, South Africa Company Stories
⚡ TL;DRStandard Bank is Africa’s largest bank by assets, built from a nineteenth-century colonial trade financier into a continental group operating in twenty African countries — after an expensive detour into global emerging markets that it largely...
