The Banker Who Measures Power in People, Not Profit

From a childhood shaped by communal dignity to leading one of Africa's biggest banking portfolios, Funeka Montjane carries a simple premise into rooms of capital and policy: leadership is proved not by how much you control, but by how many you enable. As the IWFSA prepares to host global women leaders in Cape Town, she argues that Africa's future will be written by those who build community before they build empires.

- By Funeka Montjane

"I was raised by my two maternal grandmothers and a grandfather," says Funeka Montjane. "They were people who were in full command of themselves."

"They worked as domestic workers and blue-collar workers, the kind of labour the world rarely pauses to honour," she says. "But inside the home, they carried themselves with dignity and expectation. They believed in education, in hard work, in reading. They made me believe my life would not be limited by circumstance. They made me believe I could be anything I wanted to be."

The house she grew up in functioned as more than a family home. It was a place where neighbours walked in without knocking, where problems were handled collectively, and where help was organised long before anyone used the word "networking." When she wanted to drop maths in high school, her grandparents found her a tutor. "They knew how to bring people together," she says. "That was their strength."

She came of age in the first decade of democracy, when scholarships ap peared, companies began opening their doors to Black graduates, and hope was not yet something people had to defend. "We benefited from that moment," she says. "Which means we carry a responsibility to honour it."

Today she leads Personal and Private Banking at Standard Bank Group and is a prominent figure within the International Women's Forum South Africa, which is hosting its global Cornerstone Conference in Cape Town this week. The link between her upbringing and her boardroom life is not something she tries to manufacture.

"In a way, my story is a South African story," she says. "It is about people who had very little, but who carried a vision much larger than themselves."