How South African founder Hendrik du Toit built Ninety One, which manages $240 billion

Hendrik du Toit, the South African money manager who founded Investec Asset Management in 1991 and still runs it as Ninety One, oversaw £181.4 billion ($240 billion) of client money at the end of September, according to a trading update the London- and Johannesburg-listed firm published on Oct. 13.

The figure was down slightly from a record £184 billion ($243.4 billion) at the end of June but about 19% higher than a year earlier, when the firm managed £152.1 billion. Most of that jump came from a deal with Sanlam, the South African insurer, which handed Ninety One its third-party active fund management business in exchange for shares and a 15-year distribution partnership.

At 65, du Toit is one of the longest-serving founder-chief executives in global fund management. He has run the business for 35 years, first as a division of Investec, the Anglo-South African bank, and since March 2020 as an independent company. He built it from a desk in Johannesburg into a firm with roughly 1,180 full-time staff in 15 countries, according to Daily Investor, a South African financial news site.

His personal shareholding is small for a founder, and the reason lies in how the business was built. Du Toit never put up the money to start it. He joined Investec as an employee in 1991 to set up the bank's fund management arm, and Investec owned the business outright. Staff later earned a 20% stake, and when the firm was spun off in 2020, most of the shares went to Investec's own shareholders.

Filings show du Toit directly holds about 2.5 million shares in Ninety One plc, the London company, and about 317,000 in Ninety One Limited, its Johannesburg sister company. That is less than half a percent of the group, worth about $7 million to $8 million at recent prices.

His larger economic interest sits inside Forty Two Point Two, a Mauritius-registered company wholly owned by an employee trust called the Marathon Trust. Its beneficiaries include du Toit, fellow board member Kim McFarland and several other senior Ninety One executives, according to a regulatory notice. The vehicle is the group's largest shareholder, with about 25.4% of the combined company in August, a stake worth roughly £500 million ($660 million) at recent share prices. The filings do not disclose how much of the trust belongs to du Toit.

The rest of the register is dominated by South African institutions. The Public Investment Corporation, which manages pensions for South Africa's government employees, and Investec each hold about 10% of the group, according to market data. Sanlam owns about 12.3% after its deal with Ninety One this year, and Cape Town fund manager Allan Gray holds about 5%.

Starting out at Investec

Du Toit was born in 1961 and grew up in central Cape Town, where he finished school at Hoërskool Jan van Riebeeck, Daily Investor reported. He earned a master's degree in economics from Stellenbosch University and an MPhil in the economics and politics of development from the University of Cambridge, according to his World Economic Forum biography.

He entered the investment business in 1988 in the investment division of Old Mutual, then South Africa's largest insurer. Investec, a fast-growing Johannesburg bank led by Stephen Koseff and Bernard Kantor, approached him several times before he agreed to join in 1991, at age 29, to build its fund management arm. When he arrived he found an empty desk in the corporate finance team and no computer.

"They had less than R200 million under management!" du Toit said of the division in a 2018 interview published by Investec Asset Management. That sum is equal to about $12 million at today's exchange rate. He chose to run the new business from Cape Town rather than Johannesburg, arguing it could be managed from there as well as from any financial center.

The timing looked poor. South Africa was in the final years of apartheid, and investors were gloomy. "When we started life in the early 90s, people in South Africa were incredibly bearish," he said in the same interview. "The toughest thing in any business is getting through the first five years."

Du Toit's team went after market share held by the country's big life insurers and banks. "We were up against the big established insurers and banks, and investors had become very set in their ways," he told Daily Investor. "What drove us is that we believed in risk. We had a risk-driven set of products while many others avoided risk." The firm bought mid-sized growth companies at a time when local managers favored old blue chips, a bet that paid off as South Africa reopened to the world after 1994.

The name Ninety One, adopted almost three decades later, refers to that founding year.

Expansion into London

The business stopped being purely South African in 1998. That year Investec bought Guinness Mahon, a London merchant bank, from Japan's Bank of Yokohama, Euromoney reported at the time. The deal gave Investec a large stake in Guinness Flight Hambro, a London-based global fund manager, and the merger of Guinness Flight with Investec's asset management arm was completed in November 1998, according to Money Marketing, a UK trade publication.

The acquisition gave du Toit offices in London, Hong Kong, New York and Guernsey and a set of international funds. Tim Guinness, who had run Guinness Flight, stayed on in a senior role before returning to managing money, according to a 2011 interview with The Wall Street Transcript.

Around 2000 the firm introduced 4Factor, an in-house stock selection process that scores companies on strategy, earnings, valuation and technical factors. The firm also built a large emerging market debt business and became one of the biggest money managers in South Africa. Assets passed R1 trillion in 2013.

Staff also owned part of the business. By the time Investec decided to spin it off, employees owned about 20% of the business through Forty Two Point Two and employee benefit trusts, with Investec holding the remaining 80%, according to Investec's demerger documents.

Leaving Investec

In February 2018, Investec announced that Koseff and Kantor, who had run the bank for decades, would step down. Du Toit became joint chief executive of the whole Investec group in October 2018, alongside Fani Titi, a South African banker who had been the group's chairman. A month earlier, on Sept. 14, 2018, Investec said it would demerge the asset management business. The board concluded that the fund manager had "limited synergies" with the rest of the bank, according to Investec's demerger page.

The listing landed at a difficult time. Ninety One shares started trading in London and Johannesburg on March 16, 2020, the same week global markets were collapsing over Covid-19. Investec had planned to sell 10% of the company to new investors in an offering priced at between 190 pence and 235 pence a share. It dropped that sale because of market volatility and kept a 25% stake instead, Daily Maverick reported. Investec shareholders received 55% of the company, and staff kept about 20%.

"Ours is a long-term story," du Toit said on the day of the listing. At the time the firm managed about £121 billion, equal to about $160 billion at today's rates.

Investec later reduced its position. In November 2021, it said it would hand 15% of Ninety One to its own shareholders, and in February 2022 it said it would keep a 10% stake after that distribution, Sharecast News reported.

The years after the listing were hard for the business. Higher interest rates in the US and Europe pulled money out of emerging market and risk assets, two areas where Ninety One is strong. Assets fell from £143.9 billion at the end of March 2022 to £126 billion two years later, according to figures compiled by Daily Investor. Net outflows reached £10.6 billion in the year to March 2023 and £9.4 billion the following year, Moonstone, a South African financial advisory publication, reported. "For the second consecutive year, conditions remained difficult for our industry and for Ninety One," du Toit and chairman Gareth Penny wrote in the 2024 annual report.

Outflows continued in the year to March 2025, at £4.9 billion ($6.5 billion), according to the company's results. Three-year investment outperformance across the firm, which had been 71% in 2023, fell to 43% in 2024, Daily Investor reported.

The firm also had a regulatory setback in that period. In November 2024, South Africa's Financial Sector Conduct Authority fined the unit Ninety One Fund Managers R3 million ($180,000) for breaches of the country's anti-money laundering law, including weaknesses in how it rated clients for risk and checked their identities. R500,000 of the penalty was suspended. Ninety One appealed, then settled, and the matter was confirmed as an appeal board order in April 2025. The company said the regulator made no finding of money laundering and that there was "no loss, harm, or prejudice to any Ninety One clients at any time," according to Moonstone. The firm said it had strengthened its internal processes.

His pay has also drawn some criticism at home. Active Shareholder, a South African shareholder activist group, voted against Ninety One's 2025 remuneration report and policy, saying it "cannot support the very high fixed remuneration levels." Du Toit's total pay for the year to March 2025 was £2.95 million ($3.9 million). Both resolutions still passed with more than 93% support, and he was re-elected to the board with 99.79% of the vote.

Sanlam deal and Johannesburg plan

The deal that pulled the business out of its slump was announced in November 2024. Under it, Sanlam, Africa's largest non-bank financial services group, agreed to transfer its active asset management operations in the UK and South Africa to Ninety One. Ninety One became Sanlam's main active manager for single-managed local and global products, with preferred access to the insurer's South African sales network. Sanlam also agreed to act as an anchor investor in Ninety One's international private credit strategies.

The UK part, worth £1.9 billion, moved across in mid-2025. The South African part, Sanlam Investment Management, closed on Feb. 2, 2026, when Ninety One issued about 45.4 million plc shares and 66.6 million Limited shares to Sanlam companies. Sanlam ended up with about 12.3% of the combined group, BusinessDay reported. Du Toit called the deal "a meaningful investment in South Africa's savings and investment landscape."

The transaction added £18.3 billion ($24.2 billion) of assets, about R401 billion, in the year to March 2026. Without it, Ninety One still had net inflows of £2.8 billion ($3.7 billion), reversing the previous year's outflows. Assets at the end of March reached £171.8 billion ($227.3 billion), up 31% from a year earlier.

Adjusted operating profit rose 12% to £211.3 million ($279.5 million) on net revenue of £650.2 million ($860.1 million), according to the results published on June 3. The firm raised its full-year dividend 10% to 13.4 pence a share. Three-year investment outperformance recovered to 69%.

"Ninety One is a resilient and robust business with positive momentum," du Toit said in the results statement. "The demand recovery for emerging markets is visible and our offering competitive."

On South African radio the same day, he argued that money was starting to move away from the US after a long period of dominance. "The world is starting to show interest in emerging market investing, from what was a very US dominated decade," he told talk show host Stephen Grootes, according to Eyewitness News.

Ninety One's London shares, which were marketed at 190 pence to 235 pence before the 2020 listing, have traded between about 200 pence and 210 pence in recent weeks. The company has been buying back stock since June, acquiring about 7.4 million shares for £15.9 million by mid-September, according to a stock exchange filing.

Du Toit has spent much of the past decade pressing global investors not to give up on developing economies. He has sat on the leadership council of the UN-backed Sustainable Development Solutions Network since 2014 and served as a commissioner of the Business and Sustainable Development Commission from 2016. He has also co-chaired the Investor Leadership Network, a group of large asset owners and managers, and is a non-executive director of the South African internet group Naspers and its European arm, Prosus.

In a 2021 opinion piece for Professional Pensions, he argued that investors were cutting emissions on paper by selling emerging market holdings. "A path that favours developed markets at the expense of others will lead to a partial net zero, which is no net zero at all," he wrote. His firm later launched an Emerging Markets Transition Debt strategy, which had $400 million committed when it was highlighted at a meeting of G20 finance ministers in Rio de Janeiro in July 2024, Bizcommunity reported.

His latest push is closer to home. On Oct. 9, du Toit told Bloomberg Television that Johannesburg, South Africa's commercial capital, had been "appallingly managed" and that Ninety One was working on plans to fund infrastructure projects there. The city, governed by a coalition led by the African National Congress, owes service providers hundreds of millions of dollars, and South Africa holds local elections on Nov. 4.

"I think it could be turned around relatively quickly, although it'll be a huge job," du Toit said. He said the firm would put in "domestic dollars first, and then bring in international dollars once the proof points are there."

Speaking to Eyewitness News, he said that "Ninety One is busy raising capital for a very significant infrastructure investment vehicle" to help rebuild the South African economy.

The next test comes in November, when Ninety One reports results for the six months to September. Those will be the first half-year figures to include a full period of the Sanlam assets.