By Staff Reporter
The Raging Bull Awards ceremony, which recognises excellence in the collective investment scheme industry and takes place on Monday, February 17 at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, will feature two distinguished speakers, Mark Barnes, and Valdene Reddy.
Guest speaker: Mark Barnes
Barnes graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1983 with a Bachelor of Business Science in Actuarial Science. After two years at Alexander Forbes, he joined Standard Merchant Bank (SMB) in corporate finance, a division he subsequently led for a number of years.
He then took responsibility for SMB’s treasury operations and, in 1991, on returning from attending the Program for Management Development at Harvard Business School in the US, was appointed to SMB’s board of directors. SMB later merged with the corporate divisions of the Standard Bank Group to form Standard Corporate and Merchant Bank (SCMB), of which he was appointed as deputy managing director.
Barnes was a member of the Standard Bank Group’s executive committee until November 1996, when he left the group to take up the position of group chief executive of Capital Alliance Holdings, an insurance and financial services group listed on the JSE.
Here, he led the strategy to merge the banking and asset management interests of Capital Alliance with the leading private equity partnership of Capital Partners to form Brait, an international investment, private equity, and merchant banking group, in 1998. He was the group CEO of Brait until March 2000 when he left to form his own corporate finance and investment banking business, Calajero.
In 2004, Barnes became the single biggest shareholder in Purple Capital. He was appointed executive chairman, and over a five-year period, led the turnaround strategy at the company.
In January 2016 Barnes was appointed as group chief executive of the South African Post Office (SAPO), a position he held until July 2019. His achievements at the helm of SAPO are well documented in the public domain, through various submissions to the parliamentary committee to which SAPO reported, in SAPO’s published annual reports, and extensively in the media.
Barnes has served on the boards of a number of public listed companies as well as major privately controlled companies. He was a Trustee of the World Wild Fund for Nature and served on the board of the South African Futures Exchange for nine years, five as chairman.
Speaker representing the JSE: Valdene Reddy
Valdene Reddy is the director of capital markets at the JSE. In this capacity, she is responsible for all primary and secondary market activity across all asset classes, as well as issuer services. This includes the sourcing of new debt and equity primary issues, the development and ongoing management of all secondary-market trading in cash and derivatives markets, and new product and market development across capital markets.
Reddy graduated from the University of Cape Town with a Bachelor of Business Science, majoring in Actuarial Science.
She began her career in 2005 at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch where she worked in equity sales and trading, focusing on local institutional clients. A year later, she moved onto the firm’s derivatives desk, where she focused on a vast span of equity-linked derivative products, facilitating the sales, structuring, and trading of these instruments with local and foreign clients.
Thereafter, Reddy moved to Renaissance Capital as head of equity derivative sales, strategically leading the change from a broking to a market-making model, across listed equity derivative products. Her client coverage universe comprised mainly institutional clients and included South Africa, Russia, and other African markets.
For the past five years, Reddy has been at the JSE, previously as head of equity and equity derivatives within the capital markets division. In this role, her primary focus was building and leveraging services and relationships across JSE clients (member firms, institutional and retail investors, brokerages, and banks) and enhancing and developing new products and offerings.
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