One of the more eyebrow-raising, intriguing executive moves of recent times has been that of Peter Moyo, who last November gave up his position as deputy MD of Old Mutual (OM) South Africa to become Alexander Forbes’s Africa MD, in charge of 14 countries.
The move was intriguing because many saw it as Moyo turning his back on an opportunity to head OM, a brand-name monolith.
But Moyo explains his move as nothing more than an opportunity to ‘do something different”, after having spent eight years at OM, five of them as number two to the inimitable Roddy Sparks.
At Alexander Forbes, he takes charge of a slightly different beast. The company mutated out of an insurance and risk division and now has a financial services division and the country’s largest independent multi-fund manager, Investment Solutions.
Since listing in 1996, it has amassed third-party funds under management of about R100-billion and some £850-million in assets under management in the United Kingdom, where their division has been active for three years.
Moyo is familiar with the financial services and the multi-manager side of business from his previous jobs. The former covers areas such as employee benefits, health consultancy and extends to personal financial services and short-term insurance for both corporate and individual clients. Where the company probably gets less recognition than it deserves is that it does not interface with the general public as Alexander Forbes, but rather places business with, say, Discovery Health, short-term insurer Santam and, of course, Old Mutual.
The part that Moyo is relatively unfamiliar with, ‘eye-popping” is how he indicated it, is the risk side of the business. Alexander Forbes has specialist risk-solution offerings that range from mining to aviation, but also take in everyday risk analysis, including for cyclists at this weekend’s Cape Argus cycle race.
Moyo’s eight-year stint at Old Mutual was sparked by a call from a headhunter to head up its employee-benefits division. ‘I told him I was an accountant and knew nothing about the business,” he recalls from his time as an audit partner at Ernst & Young, where he had risen through the ranks from an articled clerk to qualify as a chartered accountant.
‘I later discovered that employee benefits is just a fancy name for the pension business,” he says of his decision to take the plunge and move to Cape Town. That stint raised his profile as second in command and possible successor to Sparks. Last June, Sparks confessed to ‘missing him” while he was at Harvard University completing the rigorous Advanced Management Programme (AMP), largely because of robust and honest conversations around matters of strategy and transformation. He is, for instance, renowned for maintaining that ‘black firms do not only supply flowers and cleaning services. They also do legal and accounting work, and more specialised engineering and, ahem, risk management work”.
‘I want to know that if a profit is not achieved or a sale not made, a black person will be held responsible,” he says of his theory of ‘meaningful jobs”. In his current job, that means being involved in designing products, assessing risks and, crucially, having the power to hire and fire.
Moyo immersed himself in the AMP, stubbornly insisting on going when colleagues were saying the timing was not right. ‘I was in Boston for two months and never saw the place,” he says of the seven-day routine that ran from 8am to midnight for five of those days, the first half of Saturdays and Sundays after lunch. When he returned in early July, he informed Sparks that he was talking to outsiders, to bring to a close a stay in Cape Town that had turned him, and he is loath to admit this, into an occasional but avid wine drinker.
Now his main concern is to surround himself ‘with people who are better than him”, who are capable of one day leading him or taking over his job, when it eventually comes up for grabs.
This native of Bulawayo is saddened by events in his home country. ‘It’s a shame really,” he laments on the economic collapse of the past five years.
Having promptly agreed to an unscheduled dinner meeting on a Wednesday, he points out that: ‘I would never do that on a Friday.” The weekend is spent with a daughter who has resisted her father’s sway to study actuarial science and opted for medicine instead, a son who has just started soccer and a nine-year-old daughter, who, he has just discovered, loves Jo’burg so much she is not thinking about moving back to Cape Town. ‘I would also love to fit in a game of golf twice a month,” he says. Trouble is, the continent beckons.