Helena Conradie is CEO of Satrix, the leading provider of index-tracking products in South Africa. Satrix is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Sanlam Group.
Helena started her career as part of the design team responsible for establishing Sanlam’s linked-product company, today known as Glacier. She also spent two years as a quantitative analyst at Franklin Templeton Asset Management in Cape Town as part of a small start-up investment team.
Since joining Sanlam Investments in 2000, Helena has built up a highly-regarded indexation business which has over R130 billion in assets under management. Her team also manages the largest equity portfolio of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) in South Africa. Under her strategic and prescient leadership, Satrix has built up a formidable offering of both vanilla, factor and global products which are available in the retail and institutional markets across ETF, unit trust and segregated portfolios.
Her close contact with global peers has enabled Satrix to be on the forefront of investment developments such as smart beta (factor) investing. Satrix’s key focus is on index tracking in both the vanilla and smart beta space, while maintaining a strong emphasis on risk management, portfolio construction and quantitative research. Helena’s guidance has seen the Satrix investment team providing global best practice research and end to end solutions which help build holistic portfolios focusing on client outcomes.
Her firm belief in democratizing investing for all South Africans through fintech has seen initiatives such as SatrixNOW (partnering with EasyEquities) launch in December 2015. SatrixNOW.co.za is an online investment platform exclusively for Satrix index-tracking products and has no minimums.
Helena holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics (Honours) and a M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics (cum laude) from the University of Stellenbosch. She is also a CFA charterholder. She is regularly invited to speak on topics such as index investing and is currently a member of the FTSE/JSE Advisory Committee and JSE Buy Side Council. Helena serves on the Women in ETFs board for the EMEA region.
Outside of the office her interests include travelling, photography, music, running, mountain biking and hiking.