‘MAKE IT AS SIMPLISTIC AS POSSIBLE, AND THAT FORCES YOU TO BE INNOVATIVE’

GERRIE FOURIE, WHO HAS BEEN ON THE CAPITEC MANAGEMENT TEAM FOR OVER 25 YEARS, RETIRED AS CEO ON JULY 18. HAVING LED THE BANK THROUGH NOTABLE, CHALLENGING PERIODS AND ON TO GROWTH, CEMENTING IT AS A MAJOR PLAYER IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN FINANCIAL LANDSCAPE, HE SPEAKS TO FORBES AFRICA ABOUT HIS LEADERSHIP STRATEGIES, LEGACY AND WHAT HE PLANS ON DOING NEXT.

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On Championing Innovation

What I was very adamant about is that if you bring a product into the market, you need to be clearly defining that you've got a 25% to 30% differentiation on another product, because otherwise, it is extremely difficult. If you bring out a product and it's basically the same as the competitors, to sell that is difficult. So, I pushed the boundaries on thinking differently; thinking out of the box.

I remember when we did the funeral [policy] and partnered with Sanlam (a financial services company headquartered in South Africa), I used two, three examples whereby I said the price must be 25% lower than the market. They said it's impossible. I also said that if the person had a policy with another insurance company, we should be able to take over that policy immediately-there shouldn't be a six-month waiting period, because that was the norm. It's interesting-if you challenge those things, people start thinking differently and come up with different solutions.

For example, if you go into our branches, we've got side-by-side consulting-the consultant and the client look at the computer screen and the client sees what has been entered; the client is involved in the whole process, so your experience is completely different. It sounds easy but it's extremely complex to show everything to a client that a consultant is seeing and making certain that it falls into all the regulations, etc.

It's that mindset that you need to think through-it's saying: what is the best for the client, and how can we do something completely different for the client?' We're obsessed with simplicity and transparency, and so we must take the complexity away and make it as simplistic as possible, and that forces you to be innovative.

The CEO Principle