Today we are joined by Sonja de Bruyn, a tour de force of a lady with over 20 years of experience in the financial services sector having studied Law, Business and Economics. Sonja is a co-Founder and Principal Partner of Identity Capital Partners (“Identity”), a women led investment, advisory and financing firm. Identity has an investment portfolio of 12 companies in diverse sectors. Identity’s advisory services include transaction advisory, BEE retail offers, financings, transformation and empowerment policy.

She started her career in investment banking at Morgan Grenfell (now known as Deutsche Bank) in 1997 working on mergers and acquisitions, privatisations, IPOs, and financings across the Johannesburg, London and Tokyo offices and ultimately becoming a vice-president.

Sonja then joined WDB Investment Holdings from 2002-2007 as an Executive Director, where she led several large BEE acquisitions including Bidvest, FirstRand, Discovery and Anglo-Coal Inyosi. She was previously a trustee of the National Empowerment Fund and member of the Presidential Work Group on BEE.

Sonja has 15 years’ experience as a Director of Companies, having served on the Boards of FirstRand, Anglo American Platinum, and Mr Price Group. Sonja is currently a Non-Executive Director of RMB/RMI Holdings, Discovery Group and Remgro.

She holds an LLB (Honours) degree from the London School of Economics and an MA in Economics and Business from McGill University in Montreal. She completed the Harvard Executive Programme in 2012. She has been the recipient of numerous awards.

We spoke about her upbringing in exile (Zambia), working in the US and Japan. Studying in Canada, ad returning home to build and participate in the development of a new South Africa.