For the second year running, Sanlam Investment Management (SIM) Global’s Kokkie Kooyman was named the top global financial fund manager in the prestigious Investment Week Fund Manager of the Year Awards. Kooyman’s Global Financial Fund has outperformed its peers over one and three years as well as over longer periods.

Investment Week is the leading weekly investment journal in the UK. Its annual awards, held in London last night, aim to highlight funds which have consistently outperformed over a three year period and the judges also take into consideration how the outperformance was achieved, i.e. how consistent the selection is and whether the performance is sustainable.

Kooyman believes his team’s ability to find smaller growth companies that were unaffected by the global turmoil as well as mispriced ‘gems’ all over the world is what sets them apart. “Our approach has remained consistent since we started the fund in 1999. We compare and invest globally – as opposed to many of our competitors who only look at developed market banks. I have been visiting banks in Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong and China since 1995 and this has given me a very deep understanding of the banking sectors in these markets. Banks in the UK and US were added to my ‘radar’ in 1997 so we were probably ahead of our competition in terms of the developed markets too.”