AFRICAN SPEAKER BUREAU | CURATED FOR OLD MUTUAL
181 Years of Reinvention. What Must Remain Recognisably Old Mutual?
A new chair, a new chief financial officer in 2027 and a bank nearing one million customers. Dr Xolela Mangcu helps leaders decide what the institution carries into its next chapter.
Dr Xolela Mangcu has spent three decades studying how institutions survive the people who lead them. He is the biographer of Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela, is completing a biography of Desmond Tutu, and edited Becoming Worthy Ancestors, a volume of leading international scholars on memory and the archive. He is Professor of Sociology and History at George Washington University, and he has spoken to Old Mutual's leadership before. He brings Old Mutual one question that sits beneath its strategy, its succession and its new bank: which commitments still give the institution the right to be trusted, and which inherited habits have stopped serving the people who depend on it.
About this collection
Old Mutual began in Cape Town in 1845 as a mutual society: People pooling their risk so that a death or a loss would not ruin a family. It has reinvented itself several times since. It demutualised in 1999, built a London-listed international group, and in 2018 separated Quilter and unbundled the bulk of its Nedbank stake to become a focused African financial services group again. 2026 is another of those chapters. Roger Jardine succeeded Trevor Manuel as chair at the June AGM, Ranen Thakurdin has been named chief financial officer designate for 2027, and OM Bank is approaching one million customers. Each change has an owner and a plan. Together they raise questions no single plan answers: - What must stay common across businesses that own their own results? - How does a new bank earn the trust of a 181-year-old name rather than spend it? - What knowledge and judgement pass with a title, and what has to be handed over deliberately? Old Mutual's products make the questions sharper. A retirement annuity or a life policy sold today is judged decades from now, by people none of today's executives will meet. An institution in that business needs a clear view of which parts of its past still carry authority in its decisions. Sources: [Old Mutual chair succession announcement, March 2026](https://www.oldmutual.com/v3/assets/bltdd392fd32dda3ce8/blt8ec338861eb3e029/69b9516243b70c75fde510f5/Appointment_of_Chairperson_designate.pdf), [appointment of the CFO designate](https://www.oldmutual.com/om-docs/blta6f2595084163568/Appointment_of_CFO_Designate.pdf) and [interim results reporting, September 2026](https://www.ewn.co.za/2026/09/08/old-mutual-ups-dividend-says-om-bank-nearing-1-million-customers).
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