South African billionaire GT Ferreira was refused a banking licence so he bought a bank

Gerrit Thomas Ferreira and two partners applied for a South African banking licence in 1977 and were turned down.

Eight years later they took control of one instead, buying into Johann Rupert's Rand Merchant Bank and taking its name. The business that came out of it is now FirstRand, the largest financial services group in Africa, and the three of them built Discovery, OUTsurance and Momentum along the way.

Forbes ranked Ferreira among the fifty richest Africans in 2015 at $450 million. The businesses he co-founded are now worth considerably more than that between them, with Discovery above 140 billion rand and OUTsurance above 100 billion.

He is 78 and lives on a wine farm outside Stellenbosch.

Stellenbosch and a bank in Johannesburg

Ferreira took a commerce degree and a business administration degree at the University of Stellenbosch between 1964 and 1971, followed by an MBA there.

He went into banking immediately and became managing director of the Bank of Johannesburg in 1973, at 25. He held it for four years.

The people he met in that period matter more than the job. Laurie Dippenaar and Paul Harris were in the same Johannesburg financial world, and the three of them decided to build something of their own.

The company that could not be a bank

Rand Consolidated Investments opened in 1977 with a specific plan. It would provide leveraged leasing and off-balance-sheet financing to companies, structures that let a business use an asset without carrying the debt against it.

What the plan required was a banking licence, and the regulator did not give them one.

That refusal shaped everything. A finance company without a licence cannot take deposits, which means it cannot fund itself cheaply, which caps how large it can grow. Ferreira, Dippenaar and Harris spent eight years running a business with a ceiling built into it.

Buying the bank

Rand Merchant Bank had existed since 1968 and belonged to the Rupert family interests.

The three of them combined RCI with it in 1985, took control, and adopted the Rand Merchant Bank name for the merged business rather than their own. Ferreira became managing director and then executive chairman, running it until 1988.

They had solved the licence problem by purchasing a company that already held one.

RMB Holdings was created in 1987 as the holding structure above the expanding bank, and Ferreira was appointed chairman. He held that chair for more than three decades.

The reverse listing

Getting a private holding company onto the Johannesburg exchange conventionally means an initial public offering, prospectuses and underwriters.

RMB Holdings did it the other way. On July 1, 1992 it took control of Momentum Life, a company already listed, which put RMH on the exchange through the back door. It bought 30% of Momentum from Absa and 28.7% from Remgro, then transferred its entire Rand Merchant Bank shareholding into Momentum, lifting its holding in the insurer to 76.4%.

A bank had been folded into an insurer, and an unlisted holding company had become a listed one.

Ten million rand and an office

Adrian Gore walked into Dippenaar's office in 1992 with an idea about health insurance.

He got an office and three months of funding to write a business plan. What followed was a ten million rand investment and a company called Discovery, established as a subsidiary of Momentum Life.

Discovery is now worth more than 140 billion rand, operates in Britain, China and the United States, and its Vitality programme has been licensed by insurers on four continents.

The bullet

A violent robbery in 1993 left Ferreira shot in the torso.

He survived, and the tie he was wearing, pierced by the bullet, is displayed in a corporate museum. He went back to work.

Asked about it afterwards he said that when you put the racehorse on the racetrack, he cannot trot, because he wants to run.

He stepped back from daily operations after that, moving into the chairmanships that occupied the rest of his career.

Twenty-five million in eight weeks

The second insurance business came out of an internal proposal in 1998.

Dippenaar liked it. The board approved 25 million rand within eight weeks, and OUTsurance was founded on Feb. 28 that year, selling short-term cover directly to consumers and paying customers a cash bonus if they went years without claiming.

It is now worth more than 100 billion rand and operates in Australia and Ireland as well as South Africa.

Two companies started with an idea and a modest cheque became worth roughly 240 billion rand between them.

FirstRand

The transaction that created the group happened in April 1998.

RMB Holdings agreed with the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa to combine their financial services interests into one company, taking joint control of the result. FirstRand came out of it, bringing together First National Bank, Rand Merchant Bank, Momentum and Discovery under a single listed entity.

Ferreira was non-executive chairman of FirstRand Bank from 1998 to 2008.

The structure was unusual for South African banking. Three men who could not get a licence in 1977 now sat alongside the largest mining house in the country as joint controllers of a bank.

Rand Merchant Investment

The insurance assets were separated out in 2010.

RMI Holdings was incorporated on March 24 that year as a wholly owned subsidiary of RMB Holdings, and on March 7, 2011 RMBH, Remgro and FirstRand spun it off as a separate listed company. Ferreira chaired it from inception.

What it held was a portfolio rather than an operating business: Discovery, Momentum Metropolitan, OUTsurance, the British motor insurer Hastings, 25.1% of the online banking security company Entersekt, and a wholly owned venture capital arm called AlphaCode that held 25.1% of Merchant Capital and 3.5% of Prodigy Finance.

Ferreira retired as chairman on March 31, 2018, two weeks before his seventieth birthday, when retirement became compulsory. Jannie Durand replaced him.

Steinhoff

The largest loss of his career was personal.

Ferreira held Steinhoff shares directly, and the accounting scandal that broke in December 2017 reduced that holding from about 1.17 billion rand to 52 million.

His wine farm workers lost with him. The Tokara BEE Trust held 5.2 million Steinhoff shares and the Tokara Employees Trust held 4.9 million at the end of November 2017. Those positions were worth about 18 million rand after the collapse.

RMB Holdings had separately acquired a 44% stake in Atterbury Europe, a property business aligned with Steinhoff, which caused its own shareholders considerable anxiety when the extent of the problem became clear.

The unbundling

RMI announced in September 2021 that it would unbundle its Discovery and Momentum Metropolitan shareholdings and run a rights issue.

The reasoning was a discount. Holding companies routinely trade below the combined value of what they own, and RMI said the unbundling would unlock material shareholder value by reducing the gap between its share price and its intrinsic value, while repositioning it around property and specialist investments.

The restructuring completed in 2022. OUTsurance was retained as the principal underlying business and RMI Holdings was renamed OUTsurance Group.

The company Ferreira chaired from its creation no longer exists under that name.

Tokara

He and his wife Anne-Marie bought land at the foot of the Simonsberg mountain outside Stellenbosch in 1994, the year South Africa held its first democratic election.

They named the farm Tokara, combining their children's names, Thomas and Kara. Ferreira discovered afterwards that he had bought some of the best wine-growing soil in the region, and the estate now produces wine and olive oil and appeared on the extended list of the World's 50 Best Vineyards in 2025.

He moved there after retiring from RMI.

What he holds now

Ferreira sits on roughly thirty private companies.

Some are recognisable. Whitmar Holdings. Lenco Holdings, a packaging manufacturer in Goodwood producing materials for the clothing, cookware and footwear industries. Rand Merchant Holdings and Rand Consolidated Holdings, the vehicles that carry the original names.

Most are property companies with numbers for names: Basfour 704 and 767, Chartpro Properties 5 and 6, Electprops 193, Webfer Properties, Real Worx Twenty Eight, Vescom Twelve, Bulldozer Creek Woning.

Two are named by somebody enjoying himself. One is called Engulf and Devour Investments. The other, registered after he retired to Stellenbosch, is called The Best Little Company in the Whole Wide World.

He served as lead independent non-executive director at Remgro from 2009 to 2019, which put him on the board of Johann Rupert's investment company more than two decades after buying Rupert's bank. He chaired OUTsurance Group from 2010 to 2018, and he has sat on the boards of Anglo American's South African arm, the Industrial Development Corporation, AIG South Africa and the Open Society Foundation of South Africa.

He is a trustee of the University of Stellenbosch and sits on its investment committee, and the Cape Town Chamber of Business named him business leader of the year in 2010.

Whether he is still a dollar billionaire depends on which valuation you accept. Forbes stopped publishing a figure for him after 2015, when it was $450 million, and the Steinhoff collapse cost him more than a billion rand of that before the rest of his holdings recovered.

What is not in dispute is the arithmetic of what he started. Three men who were refused a banking licence in 1977 built businesses now worth several hundred billion rand, and two of those businesses began with cheques of ten million and twenty-five million rand.