Lessons in enterprise: Jannie Mouton’s moment, from PSG to Capitec, then on to Curro

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. 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.

PSG Group as the ‘mother ship’ (the incubator)

The PSG Group was founded in November 1995 by Mouton and Chris Otto. 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.

Capitec

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.

PSG Financial Services (formerly PSG Konsult)

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).

Curro

PSG’s early investment in Curro was made when Curro had only three schools. Fast-forward and Curro has been described by GCR ratings as the largest independent school group in South Africa, operating 189 schools on 81 campuses at the beginning of this year.

Now add the philanthropic-structural twist: the Jannie Mouton Stigting’s proposed R7.2-billion buyout of Curro (and delisting plan). There are some murmurings about potential insider trading around this, but notwithstanding, Curro’s shift holds the potential for a pathway where private-sector scale, philanthropic intent and public benefit converge. DM