Company News in Brief

Standard Bank hunts for SA sales as it leverages Liberty's impressive data, 2 000 advisors



Standard Bank plans to use the almost 4 000 advisors and personal bankers employed across the group to cross-sell more insurance and investment products to its almost 12 million SA clients.



Since buying out Liberty minorities in 2022, the insurer has been integrated into the group's new insurance and asset management unit. This also houses fund manager Stanlib, short-term insurance business Standard Insurance, boutique investor Melville Douglas, the Liberty Two Degrees property portfolio, and insurance and investment operations in the rest of Africa.



Liberty CEO Yuresh Maharaj told News24 he sees an opportunity to leverage Liberty's 2 000 tied advisors and pair them with Standard Bank's roughly 800 in-house financial advisors and its 1 000 relationship bankers to drive higher insurance and investment sales volumes in SA.



While the longer-term goal is to replicate that strategy in key East and West African markets, the immediate focus is at home.



"When you talk about SA, that's our biggest opportunity – the provision of advice-led complex solutions in the risk and investment space so we can meet clients' financial needs over and above their banking needs," says Maharaj, who also heads up Standard Bank's investment and asset management unit.



"If you combine our distribution in SA across Liberty and the rest of the group, then, undoubtedly, Standard Bank has the largest distribution capability in the local market."



The immediate low-hanging fruit available to the group is the roughly 300 000 retail affluent clients of Liberty, where Standard Bank's penetration is only about 30%.



Maharaj sees an opportunity to persuade those clients into the Standard Bank fold by putting Liberty advisors and the group's banking relationship managers in front of them to find out how the group can better serve their financial needs.

-FIN24



South Africa's Pick n Pay sees wider H1 headline loss



South African grocery retailer Pick n Pay on Thursday forecast a wider half-year headline loss, but said it expects its full-year result before tax and capital items to show a meaningful improvement on the prior year.

The company did not indicate whether it expected a profit or a loss for the full year.

In the 26 weeks to Aug. 25, the country's third biggest grocery retailer said it expects its comparable headline loss of between 142.84 cents and 131.85 cents per share, compared with an adjusted loss of 109.88 cents in the prior year.



Pick n Pay said its full-year performance will be supported by trading profit growth at its discount grocery chain Boxer and expectations of a much-reduced trading loss at its Pick n Pay supermarkets business.

A reduction in interest charges in the second half, thanks to its recapitalisation, will also support its full year performance, the retailer added.

Group sales for the period increased by 3.7%, with Pick n Pay sales, including grocery and clothing, down 0.3% due to the closure of 24 supermarkets. On a like-for-like basis, Pick n Pay sales inched up 0.5%, with South Africa sales marginally up 0.1%.



Sales of the discount grocery business Boxer, which Pick n Pay is aiming to list on the bourse by the end of the year, grew 12% driven by strong like-for-like sales, complemented by new store openings, the retailer said.

Pick n Pay is in the middle of a turnaround and two-step recapitalisation plan aimed at turning the core Pick n Pay supermarket business profitable after losing market share to bigger rivals Shoprite (SHPJ.J), opens new tab and others for more than a decade.

Pick n Pay said it is starting to see early progress in the turnaround of Pick n Pay company-owned supermarkets in South Africa, with steady improvement in like-for-like sales growth, its key turnaround indicator.

-REUTERS



UBS sells its 50% stake in Swisscard to American Express



UBS is offloading part of the Credit Suisse business it acquired last year with a deal to sell the fallen bank's 50% stake in credit card provider Swisscard.

UBS will sell its 50% holding in the company to its joint venture partner American Express, Swisscard said in a statement.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

After the deal, Amex will become the sole owner of Swisscard, with Credit Suisse customers transferring to the existing UBS credit card platform.

Swisscard said it would continue to issue all other cards it issues under the American Express, Mastercard and Visa licenses and will continue to operate the American Express business in Switzerland.

There is no near-term impact on any of these cardholders, merchants or partners, the company said.

Following its emergency takeover last year, UBS is now divesting parts of the Credit Suisse business. In June it sold a stake in Credit Suisse Securities (China), and in July it agreed to sell a former insurance-linked investment arm of the bank to its management.

UBS on Monday said it was fully committed to its credit card business, but issuing credit cards in Switzerland through Swisscard did not "align with the existing operational setup and strategic priorities of UBS as legal successor to Credit Suisse."

The bank said there was no need for action by cardholders, with clients holding Credit Suisse branded credit cards to be informed about new card issuance in the first half of 2025.

-REUTERS



Microsoft to let clients build AI agents for routine tasks from November



Microsoft will allow its customers to build autonomous artificial intelligence agents from next month, in its latest push to tap the booming technology amid growing investor scrutiny of its hefty AI investments.

The company is positioning autonomous agents - programs that need little human intervention unlike chatbots - as "apps for an AI-driven world" that can handle client queries, identify sales leads and manage inventory.



Other big technology companies such as Salesforce have also touted the potential of such agents, tools that some analysts say could provide companies with an easier path to monetizing the billions of dollars they are pouring into AI.

Microsoft said its customers can use Copilot Studio - an application that requires little knowledge of computer code - to create such agents in public preview from November. It is using several AI models developed in-house and by OpenAI for the agents.

introducing 10 ready-for-use agents that can help with routine tasks ranging from managing supply chain to expense tracking and client communications.

In a demo, McKinsey & Co, which had early access to the tools, created an agent that can manage client inquires by checking interaction history, identifying the consultant for the task and scheduling a follow-up meeting.

"The idea is that Copilot (the company's chatbot) is the user interface for AI," Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president of business and industry Copilot at Microsoft, told Reuters.

"Every employee will have a Copilot, their personalized AI agent, and then they will use that Copilot to interface and interact with the sea of AI agents that will be out there."

Tech giants are facing pressure to show returns on their big AI investments. Microsoft's shares fell 2.8% in the September quarter, underperforming the S&P 500 (.SPX), opens new tab, but remain more than 10% higher for the year.

Some concerns have risen in recent months about the pace of Copilot adoption, with research firm Gartner saying in August its survey of 152 IT organizations showed the vast majority had not progressed their Copilot initiatives past the pilot stage.

-REUTERS



KKR extends tender period for Fuji Soft to November



U.S. investment firm KKR has extended by 10 working days the first stage of its tender to take Japanese IT services firm Fuji Soft private, it said in a filing on Monday.

The extension comes after Bain Capital made a rival proposal to buy all the shares of Fuji Soft at a higher price, setting the stage for a battle over the Japanese company by two of the biggest names in global private equity.



KKR initially offered 8,800 yen ($58.71) per share in August which was followed last month by Bain's 9,450 yen per share bid.

KKR then switched to a two-stage process that would allow shareholders to take part in an initial tender or a later one - both at 8,800 yen per share.

The first stage was previously due to expire on Monday, Oct. 21 but will now expire on Nov. 5, KKR said.

KKR has secured commitments from major shareholders 3D Investment Partners and Farallon Capital, who together own around 32.7% of Fuji Soft, to tender their shares in the first stage.



Fuji Soft's board on Friday reiterated its support for the first stage of the KKR tender but also said it would be logical for shareholders to wait to see the outcome of Bain's proposal, adding that it had not made a decision on either Bain's bid or KKR's second stage.

Bain has said its offer is predicated on winning the company's backing.

Fuji Soft founder Hiroshi Nozawa in a letter last week urged the company to withdraw its recommendation for KKR's offer as Bain's higher price was "clearly in the common interest of shareholders".

Nozawa, who along with his family holds 18.5% of Fuji Soft's shares, also questioned the necessity of privatisation, which he said was led by investors rather than management.

-REUTERS