Authentic Disruption in South Africa

with Magda Wierzycka
 

Thursday, March 18, 2021
7:30 a.m. – 8:30 a.m. ET
Zoom link will be provided separately.
Register Here

Please join us for a discussion with the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sygnia Limited, Magda Wierzycka, in conversation with Donald Weiss, Professor of Business at Columbia Business School on her fight for ethical business leadership and diverse representation in South Africa. Wierzycka will specifically speak to her experience as a Polish immigrant turned business magnate who speaks out about corruption in the political and private-sector arenas.

This event, co-sponsored by The Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business, African Business Club, and Global Citizenship, is part of the Phillips Pathway for Inclusive Leadership (PPIL) program, focusing on the DEI essential skills of addressing systemic inequity and communicating across identities, as well as covering topics of gender identity and equity, global citizenship, and racial identity and equity.

About Magda Wierzycka:

Magda qualified as a Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries (Edinburgh) in 1994. She has over 20 years’ experience in the South African asset management industry and has published widely in the field. She has also served as a board member of the Actuarial Society of South Africa.

She started her career as a product development and investments actuary at Southern Life in 1993, where she designed and managed index-tracking funds, followed by two years at Alexander Forbes as an investment consultant. In 1997 she joined Coronation Fund Managers as Head of Institutional Business and a director. While at Coronation she was responsible for growing the institutional assets under management of the company fivefold. Magda left Coronation in 2003 to start IQvest, a fund of hedge funds company. Later that year, after selling IQvest to the African Harvest group, she was appointed to the position of CEO of African Harvest. Under her stewardship the assets under management of the company grew from R10 billion in 2003 to R35 billion in 2006. After negotiating the sale of African Harvest Fund Managers to Cadiz Financial Services in 2006, she led the management buy-out of the remainder of the African Harvest group which resulted in the formation of Sygnia.

She grew Sygnia’s assets from R2 billion to R238 billion in September 2019, leading Sygnia to become the second largest multimanagement company in South Africa. Sygnia listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange on 14 October 2015 (the share offer was 20x oversubscribed).