With a market cap of £5.75bn, Nedbank is the fourth-largest bank in South Africa and was founded more than 130 years ago.
It is the umbrella company of Nedgroup Investments, a London-based global investment firm which partners with boutiques to provide investment solutions to both retail and institutional investors.
Nedgroup Investments itself was founded in 2003 and currently has £15bn of assets under management. But despite its 21-year history and the backing of Nedbank as its parent, managing director Tom Caddick says the business’s key goal for 2025 is to “build [its] voice in the industry”.
“We made huge progress last year, and now our growth plan for the business is to build on the foundations we have put in place,” he tells Portfolio Adviser.
“Developing our voice and what we stand for is always a challenge, in terms of who we really are and how we get that across. That is going to be one of our key targets for this year – to build on the good work we produced in 2023 and 2024.”
Caddick joined Nedgroup Investments in 2021 as its head of investments, before becoming the MD in December 2022. Having previously spent almost a decade at Santander Asset Management – most recently as chief investment officer – he points out that having a large, well-known bank as a parent company can offer both rewards and challenges.
“What I liked about Nedgroup Investments was that it has a really good founder’s mentality. If you fly into Cape Town, or Johannesburg, every single cash point is branded with Nedbank logos. It’s a huge name, but clearly not over here. This has its positives and its negatives,” he explains.
“When I was at Santander, I found the name could open doors, but it could also close them or keep them from opening all the way, because people don’t always want to do business with a high-street name.
“What I saw with Nedgroup was really positive. Why wasn’t it bigger internationally? It had all the hallmarks of a business that could do really well. It could, should and would grow its connectivity to the private wealth business in the UK, this is something most asset management firms would absolutely love to have.
“There is no negative connectivity in terms of that bank affiliation. This means there is a large parent company with a good reputation in the industry, which is not necessarily huge over here, with really good people at its helm and a great long-term track record.”
The power of boutiques
The other ‘pull factor’ towards joining Nedgroup, says Caddick, was its partnerships with boutique asset managers – an area he feels passionately about. It ties in with Caddick’s pedigree as a multi-asset, multi-manager investor. Prior to his time at Santander’s asset management arm, Caddick was head of multi-manager and fund selection at LV=, and a multi-asset fund manager at F&C Asset Management.
“In terms of partnerships with boutique managers, this is something I was very much missing while I was part of a bigger organisation where, in many cases, we couldn’t invest in smaller, more focused management groups because of our size,” he says.
When Caddick took over the helm of Nedgroup Investments, it had a long track record of partnering with pre-existing external boutiques, offering them an environment where they could focus on generating returns for clients without contending with the additional pressures of growing, running and investing in their own businesses.
Read the rest of this article in the February issue of Portfolio Adviser magazine