Old Mutual Bets on External Hires to Close the Gap on Banking Rivals

Old Mutual has made five senior external appointments across its banking, insurance, and life and savings businesses, signalling an acceleration of the 181-year-old group’s push into South Africa’s intensely competitive financial services market and a deliberate shift toward recruiting talent that has built competing businesses from the ground up.

Old Mutual — senior external appointments, 2026

The most closely watched of the appointments is at OM Bank, the group’s digital banking subsidiary launched to the public in 2025. Ethel Nyembe has joined as chief product and innovation officer, effective January 2026, bringing more than two decades of experience across banking, payments, and product innovation at FNB and Standard Bank. A founding member of Women in Payments Africa, she will lead the development of OM Bank’s digitally native product suite. Alongside her, Ancley Jacobs joins as chief growth officer from May 2026, having spent 16 years at FNB — including as chief executive of Retail Transactional Banking — before moving to Standard Bank where he led product strategy for South Africa. In his new role, Jacobs will oversee marketing, retail sales, strategic partnerships, home loans, and business banking.

The rationale for recruiting from the established banks is plain. Both Nyembe and Jacobs have built and scaled the exact capabilities — digital product development, retail customer acquisition, transactional banking growth — that OM Bank needs to execute against its stated ambition. OM Bank’s customer base grew from 284,000 at the end of 2025 to 473,000 in the first quarter of 2026 alone, and the bank is expected to launch its lending activities in the second half of 2026. The trajectory is notable for a bank that opened to the public fewer than twelve months ago. For context, it took Capitec — now South Africa’s largest bank by customer numbers with over 23 million clients — considerably longer to achieve comparable early-stage momentum, though the digital infrastructure available today compresses those timelines substantially.

CEO Clarence Nethengwe has framed OM Bank not as a price-led digital challenger but as a fully integrated financial ecosystem designed to serve aspirational South Africans who sit at the intersection of insurance, banking, and wealth management. The bank is targeting customers earning between R8,000 and R80,000 per month, with the immediate focus on the middle-income segment where Capitec has built its dominance. Old Mutual has earmarked R1.7 billion in discretionary capital for OM Bank in 2026 alone, with expected annual losses of between R1.1 billion and R1.3 billion for the next two years before moving towards monthly break-even in 2028. The bank currently operates across 346 Old Mutual partner branches and employs 330 staff, with plans to expand to between 3,000 and 3,500 employees by 2028 as Old Mutual Finance’s branch network becomes a distribution channel.

OM Bank — customer growth trajectory

The appointments outside OM Bank are equally significant and reveal a group making multiple simultaneous competitive moves. Katherine Barker joined Old Mutual Life and Savings as proposition executive head in April 2026. She arrives as the founding chief executive of Capitec Life, where she built a fully licensed digital life insurer from inception — establishing the governance framework, operating model, and leadership structure that turned a concept into a functioning business. Her hiring by Old Mutual is a direct transfer of institutional knowledge from one of the fastest-growing insurance entrants in the country into Old Mutual’s heartland life and savings business — the unit responsible for the group’s most established revenue streams.

Malusi Ndlovu will rejoin Old Mutual from 1 July 2026, taking the role of managing director of the Mass Foundation Cluster at Old Mutual Life and Savings. He returns after a period at Absa, where he consolidated the bank’s wealth business and built new distribution channels. His prior experience at Old Mutual Corporate, where he led some of the largest employee benefits transactions in South Africa, gives him both institutional familiarity and external market perspective. The mass foundation cluster is Old Mutual’s primary vehicle for serving lower-income and emerging middle-class customers — the demographic where Capitec, Pepkor’s forthcoming bank, and several other challengers are also building.

Mari Janzen rounds out the cohort as the new COO of Old Mutual Insure, effective June 2026, joining from Hollard Insurance where she held the equivalent role. Her background spans Regent Insurance, Telesure, and Deloitte Consulting. Old Mutual Insure, which was in the process of transitioning its CEO role from Charles Nortje to Soul Abraham from April 2026, now has new operational leadership to complement the incoming executive.

Group CEO Jurie Strydom characterised the appointments as a statement of intent, noting that attracting external talent with proven expertise and track records was designed to complement the group’s internal pipeline and accelerate strategic delivery across the business. The language is consistent with a group that has identified execution speed as the gap it most needs to close.

The context in which these appointments land is one of structural competitive pressure. South Africa’s bancassurance market is being reshaped simultaneously from multiple directions. Sanlam is deepening its banking relationship through its partnership with GoTyme, formerly TymeBank, giving it access to a combined client base of approximately 17 million. Pepkor, with 32 million customers and Prudential Authority approval to open a bank by April 2027, is building towards the mass market from a retail starting point. Discovery Bank continues to grow its affluent and professional client base. South Africa’s Big Four banks — Absa, Standard Bank, Nedbank, and FirstRand — posted combined headline earnings of R152 billion in 2025, a figure that demonstrates the scale of the prize Old Mutual is pursuing.

Old Mutual, founded in 1845 and valued at approximately R60 billion on the JSE, enters this contest with a balance sheet, branch network, and customer base that most digital challengers cannot replicate. The five appointments announced this week are the clearest indication yet that the group has moved from strategic deliberation to operational execution — and that it is willing to recruit directly from the institutions it intends to compete against.