Business Day Spotlight

After forty years at the helm of Investec, in which he took the obscure finance leasing company started by Ian Kantor in 1974, to a financial institution straddling South Africa and the United Kingdom that oversees assets equivalent to R4 trillion, Stephen Koseff stepped aside as CEO at the end of September 2018. In part three of this extended interview, Koseff describes the “outright, outright panic” that engulfed bank executives during the midst of the global financial crisis (GFC) and how U.S. Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, saved the world. Despite having steered the ship through the GFC, Koseff still believes the small banks’ crisis in the early part of the previous decade was the closest he ever came to closing the doors at Investec, and why he thinks the lessons he learnt while writing a thesis in the 1970’s “saved this place a couple of times.”