Pretoria - The founder of FirstRand, Dr Laurie Dippenaar, an University of Pretoria (UP) alumnus, has described an honorary doctorate he recently received from the university as “a huge honour and very unexpected”.
Dippenaar, who co-founded some of the country’s biggest and most successful financial institutions, said his 40-year career as an entrepreneur in financial services could be described in four words: “traditional values, innovative ideas”.
“Of course, it’s an oversimplification, but if you needed to sum up our success in only four words, it would be those four words,” he said.
In the late 1970s, a few years after graduating from UP with a Master’s degree in commerce and then qualifying as a chartered accountant, he and two partners started Rand Consolidated Investments with initial capital of R10 000.
“We went from three people to about 45 000,” he says, referring to FirstRand, which today has total assets of R2 trillion and is the largest financial services group, by market capitalisation, in Africa,” he said.
He recalled that the initiative was started with “a basic idea that you think will turn out to be profitable”.
“In your first year, you are just trying to survive and then if you are successful with your original idea, you expand it. Ours was an expansion that took 40 years of good strategic decisions,” he said.
He said the main thrust of these strategic decisions was to constantly diversify the income of the group.
Starting out with project finance for public utility companies and municipalities, Dippenaar and his partners diversified into merchant banking, then life insurance, followed by short-term insurance, health insurance, and so on.
“We kept on diversifying, which made the group more resilient and robust,” he said.
The brands they created or expanded are household names today and they include OUTsurance and Discovery. The group also merged with brands such as First National Bank, Rand Merchant Bank, First Rand, Momentum Life and WesBank.
Dippenaar was chairperson of all these companies during his four decades in financial services.
He also served in the governing bodies of various educational institutions, including UP, where he served for 24 years, only stepping down about two years ago.
“I am probably the longest-serving council member ever,” he said.
“The transformation from the time I joined to today is amazing. The council used to be a collection of pale males from industry. Today, it is diverse in terms of gender, demographics and skills, and of course is a lot larger.”
He bemoaned the fact that youth unemployment was a serious concern, as was South Africa’s grey-listing by the Financial Action Task Force.
“To increase employment, we need economic growth and for the economy to grow, we need a capable state, and for a capable state, we need a meritocracy and a good supply of educated people,” he said.
Pretoria News