INTERVIEW WITH MFUNDO CLEMENT NKUHLU,CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER AT

INTERVIEW WITH MFUNDO CLEMENT NKUHLU, CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER AT NEDBANK

YOUR CAREER HAS EXTENDED ACROSS ACADEMIA, ACTIVISM, TRADE NEGOTIATION, AS WELL AS WORKING IN GOVERNMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL TRADE, AND NOW AS PART OF A LARGE FINANCIAL INSTITUTION. WHAT ARE YOUR SECRETS OF SUCCESS?

I have been fortunate to have had lucky breaks at critical points along my career journey. However, I do feel that my success is a combination of things. Of course, you’ve got to put in the hard and intelligent work.

At the same time, you need to surround yourself with smarter and more experienced people so that you can learn from them. Where I have had the opportunity to work with senior people, I’ve seen it as an opportunity for growth. But there’s also luck, taking advantage of breaks that come through and taken at the right moment.

If you grab the opportunities with both hands, you make headway. The constant denominator for me was never to stop learning; learning and growth are lifelong enterprises.

And there’s nothing like success breeding success. If you firmly lay that platform and succeed, you raise confidence levels in yourself and expectations from those you work with. And you keep growing the game to those levels.

YOU APPEAR TO BE INCLUSIVE IN YOUR APPROACH AND MAKING SURE IT’S A WIN-WIN FOR ALL PARTIES.

I innately believe that value creation is something that ultimately you create in collaboration with others. There is only so much that you can do all by yourself.

It is in the interaction with others that you get the multiplier effect to come through. I’ve always enjoyed working in teams, as it allows you to test your ideas, thoughts and the opportunity to refine those ideas in practice as they are implemented. I’ve always invested in good, healthy, productive relationships with peers and superiors around me.

DOES NEDBANK HAVE A SHARED PURPOSE AS PART OF ITS TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY? I hold the view that our success

is linked to the success of the society we live in, the markets in societies in which we operate as a group. So, we as Nedbank need to be relevant to our social context. We’ve invested in something over an extended period because the bank is an institution that takes a long-term view of business.

We create long-term assets in the market; we help to mobilise deposits from depositors. For institutional investors, we take those funds and create new assets. That’s part of value creation in the economy. For us, we seek to create value that’s both tangible and intangible, such as memories of a home.

This means we must understand our society very well, as this also allows us to identify opportunities that speak to our growth and sustainability. So you get into this mutually reinforcing cycle, that the more I’m relevant, the more I understand, the better placed I am to identify opportunities. And if I support citizens to grow, they generate new business sources for us; that, for us, is essentially the business of banking.

SO, YOU WOULD SAY THAT SUSTAINABILITY IS ENHANCED IN ORGANISATIONS WHEN THEY’RE IN LINE WITH SOCIETY?

No doubt about it. In the context of our business in South Africa, there are two elements to transformation. First, there is the sort of transformation that applies to organisations, the ownership structure and the board’s composition, the mix of our workforce. Our workforce will reflect the diversity that represents our country. This is the sort of transformation that is generally spoken of when we discuss transformation.

The second aspect is transformation in the business sense. Recognition that the world we live in is increasingly driven by the high speed of innovative new solutions. And these solutions are primarily predicated on a digital infrastructure backbone. In that context, the fuel of the future is data. To the extent that we understand the data world and can use data science to make sense of connections, we try to be more accurate in our predictive analytics about the likelihood of consumers making purchase decisions that would require that we are available with solutions at this moment. This is what’s driving this digital revolution. Therefore, we must invest in a refresh of our technology stack, ensuring that we run robust technology systems to support our human endeavours. These systems need to be robust and able to be modularised to respond to specific human needs.

We must understand that this technology investment isn’t just technology for technology’s sake, but it changes the business model itself. Through enhanced experiences in the market, customers are coming back with preferences. Unless we connect with those preferences and needs and enable customers to interact with us with relative ease, we’re not going to secure their business.

Customers want the feel of that relationship to be consistent across channels to reflect that it’s the Nedbank that they understand when dealing with each of those touchpoints, which creates lasting interaction with customers.

DO ALL OF US NEED TO BE CREATING SHARED VALUE FOR OUR COMMUNITIES, FAMILIES, EMPLOYEES, ANDPARTNERS?

It cannot be the responsibility of just any one single company. We must look at our fair share of contribution - and know that others are also making efforts in the same general direction. The cumulative effect of all those contributions makes a difference for society. There’s no monopoly on creating shared value.

But we certainly take pride in the contribution that we are making in sustaining that, and we hope that others join us along this journey. It’s cumulatively how we all bring together all those energies, resources, talents, and skills for South Africa. If we’re not pulling the country with us, we’re not achieving much.

MFUNDO CLEMENT NKUHLU

KEY TAKEOUTS:

• Transformation is not justabout ownerships, it’sabout creating sharedvalue for communities

• It’s not one company’s job, we all need to play our part

• Digital transformation isas important becausewe need to meet clientswhere they are anddeliver what they expect

• Life is a learningopportunity, take whatyou can from mentorsand employees