He built his latest company based on a model of enterprise and accountability rather than extractive capitalism, making his a worthy win. Businessperson of the Year:The leader whose influence and innovation extended beyond profit. Jannie Mouton is our Businessperson of the Year, not just because he chased the loudest headline, but because he built a South African playbook for durable value: patient capital, disciplined governance and the stubborn belief that a good business should outlive its founders.
Over decades, Mouton and the ecosystem around PSG have championed frameworks that forced clarity: what is the strategy, what is the return hurdle, what are the incentives, what are the governance guardrails? In a country where “connected capitalism” too often means the leakage of value, he proved that you can achieve scale without sliding into sludge. This lesson matters more than any one year’s earnings.
Awarding him Businessperson of the Year is also a vote for a specific kind of capitalism, the kind South Africa desperately needs right now. Not extractive. Not performative.
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Not built on debt-fuelled bravado. Instead built on real enterprise, real accountability, and a willingness to be judged over a decade, not a news cycle. Here’s the “company family tree” view of what Mouton helped birth, often via PSG’s incubator model, and what this has meant in practice for South Africa.
It later evolved into an investment-holding model. From the start, this powerhouse has adopted a hands-on approach, taking influential stakes, providing strategic input and supplying growth capital. PSG’s annual report explicitly notes that Capitec was started from inside PSG Group’s offices.
Capitec has since grown into a mass-market banking machine – the biggest bank in the country, with 24.1 million active clients. In its interim 2025 figures, Capitec reported that it services 182,000 businesses, with 85,000 merchants using its card machines. That’s real-world leverage for SMEs, traders and formalising cashflow.
The group’s investor updates reported assets under management of R517.6-billion in the interim period to 31 August. Impact-wise, this is the quiet compounding layer: a large advice and asset management footprint influences household savings behaviour, retirement outcomes and capital allocation across the economy (where money gets invested and at what cost).
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