South African executive Francois Gouws owns $51 million stake in PSG Financial Services

Francois Gouws holds 24,835,481 shares in PSG Financial Services, worth about 829.3 million rand at Friday's price of 3,339 cents, or roughly $51 million at 16.26 rand to the dollar.

He has run the company since July 2013.

The pay explains a good deal of how the stake was built. Gouws took total compensation of about 128 million rand in the most recent year, of which only 5.3% was salary. The remaining 94.7% came through bonuses, company stock and options, which is an unusually lopsided structure even by the standards of South African financial services and means his income depends almost entirely on the share price he is being paid to lift.

It is not new. He took 62.4 million rand in the 2019 financial year, including a 38.5 million rand long-term incentive payout.

Gouws is 61 and spent the first half of his career selling South African equities to the world.

He qualified as a chartered accountant with an accounting degree from Stellenbosch, conferred in 1987, and joined the Johannesburg stockbroker Senekal, Mouton and Kitshoff as an investment and bank analyst, becoming a partner in 1993.

That firm matters to the rest of the story. Jannie Mouton co-founded it, was forced out in 1995, and used the money to buy the shell that became PSG Group, going on to become one of the wealthiest men in South Africa. Gouws was a partner there while Mouton was still in the building, and three decades later he would run a company inside Mouton's group.

He went to UBS in 1995 as head of research in South Africa and became country head in 2000.

London followed in 2001, and the ascent from there was steep. Gouws became head of European equity research, then head of European equity sales in 2004, then head of equities for Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2006. He was made global head of cash equities in 2008, global co-head of equities in 2010, and co-managed the UBS Securities business until the end of 2011.

That was a bad time to be running equities at UBS. The bank had been among the worst casualties of the financial crisis, taking a Swiss state bailout in 2008, and it spent the following years cutting its investment bank back. Gouws left at the end of 2011, and the division he had co-run was substantially dismantled the following year.

He joined PSG in 2012 and took the chief executive's office on July 1, 2013.

What he inherited was a business built on financial advisers. Willem Theron founded PSG Financial Services in 1998 and ran it until Gouws replaced him, then stayed on as non-executive chairman for another twelve years before stepping down this year. Gouws said Theron's contribution over three decades is the advice-led platform the industry now takes for granted, and that his model ensures advisers are supported with technology, governance and the capability to focus on clients.

The company was known as PSG Konsult for most of that period and sat inside Jannie Mouton's PSG Group until the group unbundled.

It now operates a national network of advisory offices across South Africa with a presence in Namibia, running wealth management, asset management and short-term insurance, and it is listed in Johannesburg, Windhoek and on the Stock Exchange of Mauritius.

Gouws also sits on the board of the Association for Savings and Investment South Africa, the industry body, and of Lanchian Investments.

Michael Smith, the chief financial officer, has been there almost exactly as long as Gouws and holds 0.22% of the company.