Thursday 10 September 2026.
Your hosts for this year’s MIC South Africa, Tal Nieburg and Roné Swanepoel will open up proceedings with a glimpse of what’s to come for the day and their views on the year so far.
Nicky Weimar opens the conference with a wide-angle view of the forces shaping South Africa’s economic trajectory, and, by extension, the environment your clients are investing into. Fragmenting trade blocs, tariff escalation, a higher-for-longer rate environment in the developed world, persistent conflict in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and a slower, more uneven Chinese recovery are reshaping capital flows, commodity prices and risk premiums for emerging markets. Within this context, Nicky will look at the growth trajectory under the GNU, the inflation and interest rate outlook, the state of household balance sheets, the slow grind of structural reform, and the fiscal arithmetic Treasury is working with. Expect a frank read on where momentum is genuine, where it is fragile, and where the binding constraints on growth still sit.
South African investors have never had greater access to global markets, but access and execution are different things. This multi-asset panel brings together four distinct perspectives on what it takes to build robust portfolios that are diversified across asset classes and geographies, and interrogates what actually drives client outcomes. How much does the location of your fund manager matter? A wide-ranging conversation about the investment topics that are top-of-mind today and what advisers should really be asking of the managers they entrust with their clients' offshore exposure.
The 2026 agenda is available for download in PDF format. Would you like to download it?
It’s a sobering premise: hacking today is roughly 99% human manipulation and only 1% technical exploit. Banks, custodians and platform providers have invested heavily in technological defences, which means fraudsters have moved on - to the people sitting in front of the screen. For financial advisers, that is a direct operational risk. Your practice handles client identity documents, mandates, payment instructions and email traffic about money movement; from a fraudster's perspective, that is an exceptionally attractive target. From this practical session, advisers will leave with a concrete checklist for their own practices: where the highest-risk moments in your workflow sit, the handful of process controls that prevent the majority of losses, how to coach clients on what your firm will and will not ever ask them to do, and how to respond in the first hour if something does go wrong. The aim is not to make you a cybersecurity expert, it is to make your practice a materially harder target.
Many advisers who are looking to grow their business seek to attract prospective clients by highlighting their ability to be a one-stop shop for all their clients’ financial needs. However, our research on why people hired their adviser found people more often hired their adviser for emotional, not financial, reasons such as looking for someone who can help them feel more confident in their decisions. Based on our research, we provide advisers with a process for sharpening their value proposition to better resonate with what people are looking for when they hire a financial adviser.
We hand over to clients Chartered Wealth Solutions, Jurgens Group, Resolute Wealth Management and Wealth Associates to hear how they’ve grown their businesses to what they are today. How have the firms maintained their client service standards and client outcomes, whilst growing so significantly? What challenges did they overcome and what would they do differently if they were starting out today?
AI remains a dominant investment theme in 2026, with infrastructure spending set to rise by 60% to over half a trillion dollars. Kenneth Lamont explores how AI is reshaping industries, identifies key beneficiaries, and shares effective strategies for investing in equities and funds during this transformative era.
Few voices interrogate South Africa’s politics as sharply or as uncompromisingly as Prince Mashele. In this session, he will cut through the daily noise to examine the deeper structural forces shaping the country’s trajectory, and what they mean for business and society.
Mashele is known for his blunt assessments of leadership, institutional decay, and the long-term decline of dominant political formations. Expect a rigorous view on the ANC’s future, the limits of the DA and other opposition parties, and whether South Africa’s coalition era offers renewal, or simply managed instability. Looking ahead to the local government elections and beyond, he will separate political theatre from real signals, offering a hard-edged perspective on what business leaders should actually be watching and preparing for in a volatile, uncertain political cycle.
What does it really take to turn around a struggling business and build something distinctly competitive in the process? In this fireside chat, Sealand CEO Adrian Hewlett shares the inside story of taking a distressed brand with huge potential and reshaping it into a fast-growing, purpose-led business. But beyond the business story, the session will focus on the practical lessons that translate directly to advice practices. How do you make clear, decisive calls when the data is imperfect? What does it mean to differentiate in a crowded market where many offerings look the same? And how do you build a business that can scale without losing clarity of purpose or client connection? Expect a grounded, experience-driven perspective on leadership, resilience and execution, with actionable takeaways for advisers looking to strengthen their own businesses, sharpen their positioning, and create more durable client value.
