[imagesource: Sygnia]

As they say, Magda Wierzycka started from the bottom and now she’s here.

From her humble beginnings as a Polish refugee, she is fast becoming one of the richest businesswomen in South Africa by building a financial service sector empire worth billions.

BusinessTech notes that she has played a key role in the growth of numerous financial service and asset management companies, most notably, Sygnia, which she co-founded and served as long-time CEO. Currently, Sygnia has a market cap of R3.07 billion and oversees more than R318 billion in assets.

Her net worth is sitting pretty comfortably in the billion allowing her to be noted as one of “Africa’s 50 Most Powerful Women” by Forbes in 2020.

Her rags-to-riches tale begins with her birth in Poland in the late 1960s, during the era of the Soviet bloc. Wierzycka’s early life was marked by hardship and scarcity. She grew up in a cramped 60-square-metre, two-bedroom apartment, sharing the space with her parents, brother, sister, and grandmother.

As the economic situation in communist Poland worsened, political sanctions and the imposition of martial law made life increasingly difficult. In 1981, seizing a chance for a better future, Wierzycka’s family fled to Austria, leaving everything behind in search of freedom and opportunity.

For eight challenging months, they lived in a refugee centre. Despite the uncertainty and struggle, Wierzycka’s parents tirelessly sought work, determined to build a new life for their family from the ground up. That’s when, in 1982, with a measly $500 dollars in their pocket, the family came to South Africa and settled in Pretoria.

From being the new refugee girl playing catch up at Pretoria High School for Girls, obtaining a Bachelor of Business Science and a postgraduate actuarial science degree from the University of Cape Town, Wierzycka began her career that would forever change the trajectory of her life.

Fresh from uni, her first job was in 1993 at Southern Life, working in development and as an investment actuary. But she wasn’t enjoying that so she pushed herself into the investment portfolio of Southern Life, allowing her to gain the important skills for the financial services sector that she would soon dominate.

After a stint as an investment consultant at Alexander Forbes and then some time at Coronation Fund Managers – a third-party fund management company based in Cape Town, with a current market cap of R13.24 billion – she soon became one of four key senior executives, seeing the institutional assets under her management grow fivefold.

In her book, Magda: My Journey, Wierzycka dedicated a chapter to her “Coronation Years”, where she described herself as being “instrumental” in growing Coronation from a “start-up” to one of the premier asset managers in the country.

In 2003, after reportedly resigning from Coronation in a dramatic fashion—writing her resignation on a piece of tissue during a meeting—the businesswoman vowed to herself that she would “never work for anyone else again.”

That year she started a hedge fund company called IQvest, which was sold to the African Harvest group later that year. Wierzycka was appointed as CEO of the African Harvest group in 2003 and helped the company’s assets grow from R10 billion in 2003, to R35 billion in 2006.

“That was where I did most of my learning. I learnt how to run a company,” said Wierzycka.

After selling African Harvest Fund Managers to Cadiz Financial Services in 2006, she guided the buy-out of the remaining African Harvest group, ultimately creating Sygnia.

As CEO, renting a building at the Waterfront in Cape Town, Wierzycka worked by the motto “to innovate… never imitate.”

Sygnia’s assets went from R2 billion to becoming “the second largest multi-management company in South Africa, one of the two largest passive managers in the country, and the largest provider of international ETFs in South Africa,” according to their annual report.

Its assets under management and administration amount to R318.1 billion, as at 30 September 2023.

What a powerhouse!

[source:businesstech]