New JSE boss is back home
The JSE’s new CEO, Leila Fourie, says her deep emotional connection to the country of her birth was what persuaded her to return to SA.
The JSE’s new CEO, Leila Fourie, says her deep emotional connection to the country of her birth was what persuaded her to return to SA to lead the 132year-old institution after a threeyear stint in Australia.
Fourie was appointed to lead Africa’s largest stock exchange as its second female CEO when she succeeded Nicky NewtonKing at the beginning of October. “It was less about the role and more about the opportunity to give back to the country of my birth. I think the role the exchange plays in transforming the economy is very important,” says Fourie, who rejoins the JSE for the third time in her career.
After previously consulting to the JSE in the early 2000s, Fourie was hired in a permanent capacity in 2012, and rose to the position of executive director responsible for post-trade services. In 2016, she was recruited to become the CEO of the Australian Payments Network and departed for Sydney.
Since her return, Fourie wasted no time in rebuilding her profile. She and fellow South African CEO Fani Titi of Investec were invited to join an initiative led by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, which culminated in the launch of the Global Investors for Sustainable Development Alliance (GISD) in New York last week.
The initiative is aimed at using the expertise of the finance and investment industry to help access trillions of dollars from the private sector to finance the Sustainable Development Goals. Amid 30 executives considered the who’s who of the global financial system, Fourie cochaired the inaugural meeting.
“Exchanges are a vital part of the financing ecosystem promoting relevant disclosure, enabling effective price discovery and ultimately mobilising funds to productive ends. Ensuring this is calibrated to the attainment of inclusive and sustainable growth and development is part of our vision at the JSE and our commitment to the GISD Alliance,” Fourie said.
But the scale of the task of repositioning the exchange as the premier source of capital has not been lost on her. At a presentation given at the JSE this week, Fourie cited figures showing how the value of trade on all global stock exchanges dropped 18% last year while the JSE fared marginally better as it recorded a 13% fall.
This all comes at a time when the JSE is seeing the emergence of new competitors in the form of ZARX, A2x and 4AX and many small and mid-cap counters are being gobbled up by larger competitors, leading to a string of delistings.
But Fourie evidently relishes a challenge. “It forces us to lift our game and sharpen our pencil. We are recognised as a world-class exchange and we expect to increase our offering.
“We want to entrench our competitive position through links to foreign markets by enabling technology which can extend to trading services and the provision of market data.
“I think it will be very important for us to determine how we can tap into other markets such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.”
While Fourie has not received any explicit mandate from the board regarding strategy that she and her team are formulating, she acknowledged that she has already spent time considering how to access the SME market as a way to create new markets for the exchanges’ services while not diluting the quality of the companies being listed.