Former academic Johan van Zyl is stepping down as Sanlam CEO at the end of 2015, after 13 years in charge of the life insurer. What was a white, parochial life insurance fossil when he joined is slowly becoming an emerging-market financial services powerhouse. Under his management, the company has outperformed the JSE and its peers in the life insurance index, delivering a total return of 1971% since he took over (with dividends reinvested) - more than double the return of the JSE All Share's 882.6% in that time. What is left for your successor, Ian Kirk, to do?It's been a good story but many of the opportunities have only been unlocked now. While we had to work to get people to partner with us and so forth, there's a big opportunity now to start exploiting the partnerships that we have in place.We struggled for a while to get people to come and join us - in 2003, we weren't the best place to work for and so we had to build that employment brand. Nobody really wanted to partner with us and now it's different. So the stuff that [Kirk] has to work with now is much bigger, and of course that's much more difficult. We simply had to do what needed to be done, we had no real choice.In Ian's case it is about making the right choices. We've seen many South African companies [that] went offshore, messing things up massively because they simply took the first opportunity [that came] along.Which are the new partnerships you have developed?Stakeholders, essentially. We were stuck in the past. We had a few investors, and everybody told me, "You have to get rid of the board, your people aren't competitive, you're not world-class" and so forth, but you have to play with the cards you've been dealt. So we tried the best and we were able to, in my mind, not simply avoid the big mistakes, but we now have a much better company, operating with partners in a much bigger jurisdiction.Our footprint has grown massively in South Africa, into Africa, India, all these other places and therefore the opportunity set is so much bigger, and that's what Ian has to deal with: where to put the money.Where do you think the best opportunities lie? Everyone's chasing India, for example.The growth in [India] is about 5% or 6%, but the number of people becoming part of the economic mainstream becomes about 12% to 15%, so there's a massive number of people who need to be serviced at the lower end of the market - but that's where we play. So we think there's a massive opportunity from that aspect. But it's difficult to do business [in India]. Companies are expensive there, so it's not about just rushing in.And still, 75% of what we do is in South Africa. We can only do well internationally as long as we look after South African brands, and particularly the [local] customer. This is where we generate cash, where the dividends are being paid from, the big mature businesses.Sanlam doesn't seem to have made the mistakes that some of your peers have when expanding overseas, such as Discovery or Old Mutual. Was that a considered plan or were you just lucky?If you look at us in 2001 and 2002, our plans weren't very different from Old Mutual's [but] we were simply, initially, I think, quite bad at implementing them. We had other, bigger issues to deal with here at home. We didn't have surplus capital, they were much more agile when I arrived here, we said well, let's just for the next three to four years fix the South African business. And that helped us.So you were fortunate that you had to focus on South Africa: it saved you from yourselves?Yes - although, upfront, we changed the strategy to say we have a better chance in emerging markets than in developed markets, where the big people will just crush you.I've worked at the World Bank, so I've seen what happens. So you have to go to the places where you're the big elephant and not go and pretend that you're big.So when we did expand - and we had some good opportunities to go into the UK and US - we chose to rather go into Africa, which was less sexy in 2004, 2005. Now it's sexy, everybody wants to be there.Do you feel vindicated by that strategy?Yes - and it did work. And we were lucky as well. Remember, we had to sell our stake in Absa because we needed the money - that's where the actual money sat.So we tried to sell our stake, it took around a year and a half, and in that [time] the stake increased in value from about R50 a share to ... R82.50. So not only did the amount of money that we had available close to double, but just before we could spend the money we had the financial crisis, so we had the cash and all the targets sort of halved, in terms of price.That helped us massively, but that is luck, you can't plan that. When we really wanted to go out into the world, these things became much cheaper ... By 2012, emerging markets had again become so expensive, but by then we'd already made most of our investments.It seems emerging markets are becoming less sexy now. Is this going to make expansion tougher?I don't think it's going to make it tougher. The growth will still be in these markets. India's growth may go down - it has already, from about 8% to 6%, which is still a great growth rate; the same in Africa. The prices are very expensive at which you have to buy these assets and maybe over the short term, with tapering and all those things, the US will be better off. But over the longer term, if you really look at it, the US growth rate will go down because they don't have the population growth, while in emerging markets this is where most of the opportunities will arise and that is why people are willing to invest a lot of money ... we still think emerging markets will win simply because they'll have superior growth.Where does South Africa fit into all of this?We'll still do things in South Africa that make sense. We try to be a much more diversified financial services business, we have to protect our base, and we have to add things that we don't have - like healthcare.Is that potentially a big deal for Sanlam?No, it's not a very big deal financially: it's much more important for us to have a holistic way in which we can service our clients.Because we already have relationships with quite a few million of them, to offer another kind of product has tremendous value, and it keeps our competitors out of our base.It's a logical next step. Also, if you have health data, a lot of the stuff we do is about how long you will live, and if we have better information, we can better underwrite. It means we can offer better prices and we can get away from stupid decisions on our side.Is your optimistic view on the country and strategy shared by Kirk?You'll have to ask Ian, but you know, Ian has been a big part of this. People often forget that ... I recruited him into Sanlam [from Liberty] and he sat for more than two years in my office [from 2005] and a lot of the strategy we've implemented, he was party to.The trick is not to make big bets. We've learnt from many of our peers: they bought expensive businesses overseas and that's why most of our investments are relatively small. If you look at [India], it is eight small deals that we've done there, incremental each time - as we saw an additional opportunity, we put a bit more money in. The same into Africa. Most of the places we buy relatively small businesses, take virtually no risk ... and then as soon as we start understanding things we take a little bit more. We can't play with people's money. We don't play with our own and we don't play with clients'.What were your biggest challenges?The big challenge for me in thinking back was really around people.Often, erring on the safe side wasn't the right thing. Often you have a gut feel that [specific] people aren't going to help you [but], particularly in senior levels, you give people another chance. Those things don't work like that. If you have to think, "Should I give somebody another chance?", it means they've already messed up at least once and invariably they prove you wrong - you should have stuck with your first inclination.You said in your latest results that new regulations have come at the expense of product development. What's the worst thing about regulations that have been introduced?I think a lot of the rules simply make business more difficult and they don't make business necessarily better. It's not true for everything. I think, overall, business is much better, but a lot of the stuff we've implemented doesn't make us better.Such as?If you look at small business now, it is very difficult to get a small company registered. I don't know how small people do it, and there's a lot of stuff being put in place by people who've never run businesses that I can't see the reason for.You know, to make people selling funeral insurance write the same exams as somebody who's investing a million rand for a client overseas is utterly ridiculous. So we've lost 10000, 15000 people simply because they couldn't pass the exams, but the exams were totally inappropriate for these people.Talevi is a BDTV presenter..