SAIFM wishes all our members and stakeholders a wonderful 2023. We hope that you had an enjoyable and restful festive season and that you are ready for whatever 2023 has in store for us.

Members may be aware that the SAIFM CEO, Karin van Wyk, retired in 2022 after 22 years of tremendous service to the organisation and financial markets.  Our new CEO, Natalie Zimmelman, started in November last year and has brought with her a wealth of new ideas and energy to SAIFM. Amidst escalating global and domestic risks and challenges, she will have her work cut out, and we wish her and her team the very best of success. You can click here to read more about Natalie’s credentials.

While 2022 brought some normalcy back into our world, it remained a challenging year, with lingering pandemic consequences and the Russian/Ukrainian war impacting significantly on commodity prices, working their way through to inflation and monetary policies. 2023 seems set to challenge us again.  We are already seeing and expect a continued focus on financial regulatory changes as South Africa continues to follow international trends and even set global standards in some areas. The enhanced governance brought about by new and tighter regulation is deemed necessary, but will impact the conduct and operations of financial sector participants and role players. 

Unsurprisingly, we believe that focus will continue to be on issues such as regulating crypto assets and benchmarking, and we are already seeing international efforts to standardise ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) benchmarking. Global challenges such as recession risks, escalating debt levels, artificial intelligence, compromised wealth and saving levels, climate change and the possible political fallout arising from these trends, could permeate the financial sector in many different ways.

SAIFM will do everything in its power to ensure that our members have all the resources and information available to meet these challenges effectively.  This includes enhanced and extended workshop programmes, engaging with regulators on proposed regulations, supporting both the regulators and members in ensuring fit and proper requirements are met and creating an improved and expanded resource toolkit for members.

Finally, we are delighted to announce that SAIFM will be resuming its Regulatory Summit in 2023.  Please be on the lookout for notices pertaining to these exciting offerings.

We wish you all a very prosperous 2023 and look forward to an exciting journey together.

Christo Luüs

Chair – SAIFM Board of Governors