First National Bank (FNB) has obtained a 67,74% reach in under-serviced areas over the past two years in its drive to meet the Financial Sector Charter targets, which require 80% of low-income earners to be within 15km of a banking facility. The roll-out of 1Â 400 mini-ATMs across the country has been a major part of FNB’s strategy to reach isolated communities.
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/ 27 September 2005
South Africans are lagging far behind the Australians when it comes to investing directly into shares on the JSE. In South Africa about 200 000 private investors invest directly into shares rather than through mutual funds or pension funds. That figure for Australia is 5,7-million. There are many lessons South Africa can learn from the Australian stock exchange.
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/ 21 September 2005
Capital gains tax (CGT) will have been in effect for four years next month, and people are starting to feel the effects of the tax on their profits. ”In the first few years asset prices had not risen that much, but now we are seeing a boom in both the property market and the share market and the capital gains are much higher,” says Tony Barrett, regional manager at BJM Private Client Services.
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/ 7 September 2005
For Deutsche Bank and the JSE, the launch of Itrix, their range of international exchange traded funds (ETFs), could not have come at a better time amid fierce public debate on fund management fees. An ETF is a basket of shares that passively tracks an underlying index and is itself listed on a stock exchange.
In the United Kingdom the average person remortgages their home every two years. In fact, 50% of all new mortgage advances are switches with people moving from one mortgage lender to another in search of a better lending rate. This is because in the UK mortgages are viewed as a commodity rather than something attached to your bank account.
The Credit Bill, which is currently being tabled before Parliament, has highlighted the practice of credit life insurance when purchasing a vehicle. The aim of this insurance is to pay out the outstanding debt on the vehicle should you die or are unable to make some of your repayments, either through disability or retrenchment.
With the JSE Securities Exchange galloping past the 15 200 mark after another meteoric rise of 22% so far this year, one has to question whether it is wise to be investing in shares at the moment. Or is the market reaching the sort of temperature that could cause burns?
South Africans tend to invest solely in actively managed funds, yet the latest study on active versus passive management released by Deutsche Securities suggests that active managers do not always add value relative to their costs, and that passive funds have a fundamental role in an investment portfolio.
South Africans, by and large, have been reluctant to invest offshore while the South African markets have been relatively strong and the rand staged an amazing recovery, making it one of the strongest currencies in the world over the past three years. Recent rand weakness will have tempted some investors to look offshore again, but investing offshore is not just about hedging your rand bets.
The ongoing fracas around the retirement annuity business will no doubt have a deeply negative impact on our savings rate. Currently, South Africa’s savings rate is among the lowest in the world at just under 15% of gross domestic product a fraction of the 36% savings rate of South-East Asia.