PROFILE
What concerns me about
the macro-economic
environment is whether
we’ll be able to create
enough jobs going
forward in order to deal
with unemployment and
with poverty.
impact, driven by sentiment more than anything else, particularly
among global players investing in South Africa. We raise money
globally now, not just in South Africa. To fund our assets, we raise
money in Europe, in Asia, and if the ratings agencies downgrade
those people we raise money from, that becomes a potential problem
for us.’
Well, to be fair, he is also mildly concerned about the number of
bankers circulating among local institutions, or what he calls the
recycling of talent. ‘We recruit from another bank, those employees
move from us to the next bank,’ he says. ‘The pool seems generally
to be so small that we’re all poaching from one another. We need to
bring in new entrants, especially black entrants.’
There aren’t enough heads to go around. Why? ‘I think it’s a
combination of things. The pool of CAs produced by the system
is quite small, and that’s the first port of call for banks. Another
factor is because of the premium we pay to black people who are in
demand and those who are qualified; it gets to a point where it is
really costly to recruit people who are relatively inexperienced. It is
a game we have to play, but we need more people who are qualified
to get beyond that.’
Those are the kind of issues the industry can fix in the medium
term, he believes, and are nowhere near the apocalyptic importance
assigned to unsecured lending. That bugbear doesn’t bug him so
much. ‘The banks are on top of it,’ Sokutu says. ‘This is not a bubble.
This is something we can manage.’
12
THE BANKER
Edition 3
A LESSON IN LENDING
Thanks to a series of bursaries (and, as an undergraduate, the
savings of his nurse mother), Tami Sokutu didn’t have to go
cap-in-hand to a bank until he had a masters degree. When he
did, though, the experience turned into his first real lesson in
different ways of assessing risk.
‘I opened an account with one of the big banks when I first
started receiving bursary money, in 1984,’ he says. ‘In 1990,
when I finished my masters, I thought I was ready to buy a
small place of my own; it was under R200, 000. So I went to the
bank I was with, and they turned me down. I went to another
bank, one I didn’t have a relationship with, and they looked at
the numbers and gave me a hundred percent loan.’