Nedbank weighs wealth changes, Africa expansion under new CEO

Nedbank Group will weigh rejiggering its wealth management business and is looking for ways to grow its market share across the continent of Africa under newly-named Chief Executive Officer Jason Quinn.

Quinn, who will take the helm in May, is joining from Nedbank’s larger rival Absa Group, where he was financial director. Quinn previously spent 15 years at Ernst & Young LLP and rose to the rank of partner at the the Big Four auditor.

Nedbank will “over time look at our approach to the wealth of the business, which we need to sort of look at in terms of some transformation there,” Nedbank Chairman Daniel Mminele said in an interview with Bloomberg. “But also a Sub-Saharan Africa strategy of how we increase growth and returns in those areas.”

Johannesburg-based Nedbank already has operations in Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe and maintains representative offices in Ghana and Kenya. The company also has a 21% stake in the pan-African lender Ecobank Transnational.

The company’s Africa business recorded a 97% increase in headline earnings for the six months ending in June, filings show. Still, the region only contributed 16% of the group’s overall earnings, with the rest generated in the home market of South Africa.

The regional expansion plan would allow Nedbank to take on bigger rivals like Standard Bank Group, FirstRand Group, and Absa.

Quinn is taking over from current CEO Mike Brown on May 31. Brown has has been at the helm of the South African lender for 13 years.

“It’s not that we wake up every morning and say, ‘Look, we’re chasing so and so, we want to be number two, number three,’” Mminele said. “We just want to make sure that we solution appropriately for our customers and deliver the best service that we can to them, and the rest is byproducts.”

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