Anton Musgrave is the CEO of Cambium Capital. An announcement today that Citadel would buy back Sanlam share in this joint venture. The deal was only put together and announced in January. Anton, I remember you talking to Alec at the time, and you were very excited about the possibilities. But it clearly didn't realise this potential. What went wrong?

Belinda, I think if one looks back at the year we've had, it's been an incredibly tough year within the industry for a variety of reasons, and thinking back to the circumstances that obtained really in September of 2004, when the deal was initially signed off – of course the next three months was spent with all the regulatory requirements that had to be fulfilled – I think the bottom line simply is that it became clear to me and to the team that the expected inflow generation on which we predicated the business plan was going to be extremely difficult to achieve within the short to medium term. And as a consequence, the management team really took a pragmatic view and in discussion with shareholders, really felt that perhaps their efforts would be better utilised differently.

The view at the time, the reason you put it together, was the feeling that Citadel could handle the wealth-management side, whereas Sanlam had the distribution channel, and was struggling to get retirement clients and bring them through into their wealth-management side. The fact that it hasn't worked – is it a fault of that model, or is it more the environment?

I would suggest that it's the environment. I mean, if one looks at the model and its success over the last 12 months within the Citadel core business, I think that underscore the market's acceptance and belief in the model. I mean, the new business inflows from Citadel have been really stellar this year. The client retention figures remain as wonderful as over the last seven to eight years. So I don't think it's any indictment or question behind the model itself at all – quite the contrary. But I think the external environment within which that distribution channel has operated over the past 12 months has been particularly difficult, and I think that's really the fundamental cause of where we are today.

I think the pension fund adjudicator, Belinda, is really operating in a completely different space, and dealing with a section of industry which is really beyond the Cambium business or the model that we were trying to take to the market.

I think the reputational issues are really there for the entire life industry, to the extent that there are such issues. It's an industry issue. I think Sanlam has been quite brave in bringing the new solutions to market quite quickly in response to what the Adjudicator is doing, and I think they're doing quite a lot of hard work at addressing the issues. But yes, I think for the distribution network it's been a tough year.

Belinda, surprisingly little, in fact, because the business was designed really to leverage off Citadel's existing infrastructure. So we used people on the margin, we used systems on the margin, and so forth. So really, it's a very low number. We didn't have to go and build systems, buy systems and acquire expensive teams of professional people. We were already able to say, let's take the existing infrastructure and people and apply the new inflows on top of that network at very, very low, almost nominal cost impact.

We closed off with somewhere probably not far short of R500m-odd. And that was obviously from a variety of sources, which is not an insignificant sum. But it was significantly below where we had hoped to be by the 30th December. And our view, the management team's view, was just that the circumstances are such that in the short to medium term we felt the J-curve was going to be a lot deeper than we planned. And, as a consequence, perhaps the resources would be better utilised differently in each shareholder's case.

I think in due course, that's an open-ended question. It may survive, but the current thinking is that the clients within the Cambium business will be absorbed back into Citadel's business, Belinda.

Absolutely not. I mean, we've been very, very specific about that. The clients have existing relationships with their professional advisers, their wealth managers. They have their existing investments on a platform and fully invested. And there will be absolutely no practical or cost consequence of whatsoever nature. The relationships will endure, they will remain exactly the same. The service model doesn't change one iota, and there will be zero cost implication.

Anton Musgrave, the CEO of Cambium Capital, the failed joint venture between Sanlam and Citadel. Wayne, as Anton was saying, not an insignificant amount of money, but they'd hoped for a whole lot more.

Look, at the end of the day, Belinda, this is the market that I've got some exposure to. R500m doesn't cover any costs or overheads. Your margins are fairly small on that. So R500m, even though it sounds like a lot of money, in the savings field that is virtually nothing. So, as was mentioned, well below their expectations. Look, this high net worth grouping is a very, very difficult one to break into, and I would hate to say that it's exclusively the case. But generally the life insurance sales force is not in that market. You can argue they are one level below that, but they are not in the really high network. That seems to be the preserve of the private banks – RMB Private Bank, Absa Private Bank, Investec Private Bank. They have these people, in other words, let's say people with R20m and more. They already are well tied up with long-standing relationships, and to go and try break into that market is extremely difficult. It's very, very competitive.

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