By Shruti Menon Seeboo
In a world where algorithms process data at speeds no human analyst can match, where passive index funds now command more than half of all assets under management in the United States, and where artificial intelligence is reshaping the very nature of investment research, a room full of some of the sharpest investment minds on the continent gathered in Mauritius for the FinWise Annual Investment Summit 2026 to ask a question that has never felt more urgent: where does human judgement fit in?
The answer, as the day’s five presenting institutions made clear, is everywhere — but not in the way it used to. The summit, which welcomed 80 professional investors, private bankers, wealth managers, pension fund representatives, and financial services professionals representing institutions managing over USD 10 billion in investment assets, was organised around a theme that captured the tension at the heart of modern portfolio management: Human, Machine and Market. It was a theme chosen not to pit man against machine, but to explore how the two must work together if investors are to serve their clients well in an era of profound structural change.
Rajiv Lutchmiah, founder of FinWise, set the tone in his opening address with characteristic precision. “Investment management is changing rapidly,” he told delegates. “ETF index funds have made investment markets more accessible, transparent and cost efficient. Quantitative tools can process vast amounts of data. Artificial intelligence is changing the way investment research is conducted, portfolios are monitored and decisions are tested.” But he was equally clear that these developments, welcome as they are, raise a question that cannot be answered by any algorithm. “In a world increasingly shaped by indices, algorithms and machines, where does human judgement exist? Does it continue to add value?” He also issued a pointed caution about what index investing actually looks like in practice for investors who may believe they are diversified. “An investor may buy a broad index like the S&P 500, believing that the portfolio is widely diversified, while a significant portion of the capital may, in reality, be concentrated with a small group of large tech and AI-related companies.” His conclusion was measured and important. “The future of management is therefore unlikely to be about human versus machine. It is about how we combine machine efficiency with human experience, judgement, and accountability.”
The summit also marked a significant milestone for FinWise itself. Having grown from a single investment event into a platform encompassing international roadshows, web series, institutional workshops, and regional conferences across East and South Africa, FinWise launched its second magazine edition — a publication that Lutchmiah described as a deliberate effort to address an asymmetry of information that disadvantages the continent’s own investment community. “We have many talented individuals in Africa. We have great investment houses that could challenge even the best in the world,” he said. “But what I find is that there’s asymmetry of information. We don’t tend to put enough emphasis on the talent in our own continent.” The magazine, now reaching readers across 31 countries including 15 African markets, is FinWise’s answer to that gap. This year, the organisation also announced a partnership with the Financial Services Institute of Mauritius to support capacity building through practical courses in capital markets, pension funds, and wealth management.
The Hidden Engine of Portfolio Growth: Cinnabar Investment Management
Alex Cook, Chief Investment Officer of Cinnabar Investment Management, opened the presenting sessions with a talk that was as much about investor psychology as it was about portfolio construction. Cook, who has spent two decades building and refining Cinnabar’s multi-management approach, began not with a slide deck but with a story — specifically, the story of a lesson he learned the hard way during the Global Financial Crisis.
“During that period, markets — the S&P in particular — lost about 57%,” he told delegates. “And what happened to many investors is they sold out, they locked in their losses, ran into cash, and remained in cash for years and years to come. They primarily destroyed their wealth, and they also primarily changed their family’s history.” Cook’s own experience during the same period was, on the surface, a triumph. Using a stop-loss strategy in 2007 and 2008, Cinnabar made approximately 8 percent for clients while the rest of the market fell dramatically. “The clients were happy. They said, well done, very nice.” What followed, however, was the harder lesson. When quantitative easing drove a powerful market recovery, Cinnabar’s clients — sitting in cash — missed it. “We didn’t then get the benefit from all the quantitative easing which followed. And then we started to understand investor behaviour really, really well. They started to become really upset with us and many threatened to leave.”
The experience led Cook and his team to a conclusion that now sits at the very foundation of everything Cinnabar does. “Our largest job as investment professionals, to the people we serve, is to help them remain invested,” he said. “If they remain invested, they compound their wealth. When their wealth compounds, all of our business compounds. And I think if that’s the only message you take away from our learnings, that would be it.” He illustrated the point with a case study of a South African fund manager who, despite producing respectable absolute returns over a decade, suffered a 60 percent collapse in assets under management because clients could not tolerate periods of underperformance relative to their peers. “Clients can tolerate losing money as long as it’s in line with what the market is doing,” Cook said. “What clients can’t tolerate is underperforming what their peers are doing. When they meet a friend on a golf course and their golf course friend says, ‘Oh, I made 20% this year’ — if they only made 15%, they are grumpy. Very grumpy.”
Cook walked delegates through Cinnabar’s portfolio construction process, which currently encompasses 46 fund managers across seven different strategies, blending passive and active exposure in a fund-of-funds structure designed to deliver consistent, predictable performance across market cycles. “Passives are increasingly becoming an active bet,” he observed. “When you invest in the S&P index, you’re effectively investing 35% of your wealth into 10 stocks. It’s quite frightening.” He was candid about recent positioning shifts, including a reduction in passive core exposure from 75 percent to approximately 46 percent and a deliberate increase in quality-oriented managers, including a new allocation to the Thornburg Equity Income Builder Fund. “Quality is out of vogue right now,” he acknowledged. “Unless you’re favouring growth, you haven’t achieved massive portfolio growth. But when that tide turns, it won’t give warning. It’ll just happen.”
The second pillar of Cook’s message was the flywheel model that underpins Cinnabar’s business. “Everything starts with getting more clients to remain invested,” he said. “When more clients remain invested, portfolios grow. When portfolios grow, there’s predictable income inside your businesses. When that happens, it enables reinvestment. We reinvest, get more clients remaining invested.” He also emphasised the importance of independence — Cinnabar is entirely privately held and has no obligation to hold any particular fund manager’s products. “If you look at all the big players, they’re all owned by a large bank or a large insurer. And guess what you find in their portfolio? Underperforming bank portfolios, underperforming insurance portfolios. They’re forced to hold the assets. We’re not.” In a significant moment for the Mauritian investment community, Cook confirmed that Cinnabar had received distribution approval in Mauritius the previous day, making the firm’s strategies directly accessible to local investors for the first time.
Active Management: Factor Investing and Stock Selection — Confident Asset Management
Roumesh Oomah of Confident Asset Management Limited — a Mauritius-based firm established in 1997 and approaching its 30th anniversary — delivered a presentation that went to the intellectual heart of the summit’s theme: the ongoing debate between active and passive investment management, and where factor investing sits between the two.
Oomah opened with an analogy that brought the distinction to life with memorable clarity. “Let’s assume there are two ships,” he said. “One which is of state-of-the-art build and which is on autopilot — it just follows the current, it follows the wind. The only problem is if ever we have an iceberg, a storm that’s coming, it’s difficult for it to move around the market.” This, he argued, is passive investment. “On the other hand, we have the active navigator — the captain — who will see how the wind is going, where the current is pushing the ship, and will navigate in the sea where there are challenges.” He was quick to add that neither approach is inherently superior. “In both cases, the destination is the same: long-term wealth creation. We can’t say that none of the ships can control the sea, but both will face storms. The difference here lies in how they prepare and respond to each situation.”
The growth of passive investment has been extraordinary. Oomah presented data showing that the share of passive investment in the US market has grown from 19 percent in 2010 to 52 percent in 2025 — the first year in which passive exceeded active. Since 2016, active management has seen net outflows of USD 3.4 trillion. “But the question to us is, if passive investment is the way to do things, or we still have room for active management,” he said. His answer was nuanced. The concentration now embedded in passive indices — the Magnificent Seven companies now representing approximately 33 to 35 percent of the entire index — has created precisely the kind of valuation distortions that skilled active managers can exploit. “There are quite a lot of opportunities in stock selection today, because when we look at information, those mid-cap and small caps are not widely covered. All concentration is put on the top highly weighted companies and industries. So if a manager can really dig into those valuations, quality, and see how the firms are performing, there is still room for active management.”
The core of Oomah’s presentation was factor investing — what he described as “a middle between stock selection and buying a market fund.” Drawing on the foundational academic work of Fama and French, he traced the development of factor theory from its origins in the capital asset pricing model through to the modern multi-factor frameworks that incorporate size, value, momentum, profitability, and investment. “Factor investing is more passive than stock picking and less passive than full indexation,” he explained. “It’s a multi-discipline method of doing investment, where we try to use what AI is doing today and implement it into stock selection and factor selection, and then add the human judgement into it to see how we can bring value.” He was careful to acknowledge that AI, while powerful in automating factor testing, screening, and rebalancing, cannot replace human judgement when it comes to genuine regime change. “The model, once it’s built, will be there. It doesn’t adapt whenever there is a major regime change in the market. That’s very important — to have that human judgement to address the model whenever needed.”
On the post-GFC underperformance of traditional factors, Oomah was candid. “After the great financial crisis, none of the factors performed as well as the market itself, because we had a lag effect in size, value, and momentum,” he said. He attributed much of this to the ultra-low interest rate environment that favoured growth stocks, and to the superior scale and pricing power that drove large-cap dominance. But he resisted any suggestion that factors are dead. “Do we have enough empirical evidence to say that factors are dead? I think no, because 18 years of data is too short to determine if the risk premium is really gone or not. We need to wait for much longer. Evidence shows that we need to wait at least 50 years to define if the risk premium is here or not. So that brings the case that factor investing is still very much alive.”
Oomah concluded with a case study of Confident’s own CAML 25 Stock Selection Fund, launched in January 2025 and domiciled in Luxembourg as a UCITS vehicle. The fund applies the firm’s factor-investing methodology to a universe of large-cap quality companies, constructing an equally weighted portfolio of 25 stocks across US and European markets in USD, EUR, and CHF. Since launch to the end of June 2025, the fund has returned 27 percent, with an annualised return of approximately 19 percent, a standard deviation of 13 percent, and a Sharpe ratio of 1.44. “We created a portfolio which has a blend of growth and value, geographically located between the US and Europe,” he said. The fund is actively managed with a management fee of 1.15 percent per annum and a minimum subscription of USD 5,000, with assets under management now approaching USD 15 million.
The Case for Investing in India — UTI International Limited
Ajay Tyagi, CFA, who heads the equity investment team at UTI International Limited — the international arm of India’s oldest and largest asset manager — made the case for India with the quiet authority of someone who has been telling the same story for 26 years and watched it unfold exactly as he predicted. “I’ve been making this chart for the last 20 years,” he said, pointing to India’s progression from the 11th or 12th largest economy in the early 2000s to its current position as the world’s fifth largest, on course to surpass Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom to become third within two years. “What you’ve seen over the last 20 years is nothing but a reaffirmation of the fact that growth is the eighth wonder of the world.”
The structural case for India rests, in Tyagi’s view, on three pillars that remain as valid today as they were two decades ago: demographics, a growing middle class, and rising per capita income. “India, along with a few African nations and Indonesia amongst the large-sized emerging markets, is the only country which will see a reasonably strong growth in demographics for the next 20 to 30 years,” he said. While South Korea, Thailand, China, Russia, and Brazil all face declining working-age populations in the years ahead, India’s labour force will continue to expand — fuelling the domestic consumption that drives approximately 70 percent of the country’s GDP growth. “It is estimated that 50% of global middle class consumption will come from India alone by 2050,” he said. “The next wave of journey is going to be very similar to what our journey of the last two decades has been.”
On current economic conditions, Tyagi was reassuring. India’s fiscal deficit is on a declining trajectory, corporate leverage is at an all-time low, non-performing assets in the banking system are at a two-decade low, and corporate profit-to-GDP ratios have recovered strongly from their COVID-era lows. “All of these data points are supportive of the fact that the economy and its future growth is being built on a very, very strong foundation,” he said. He also made a compelling valuation argument. After a period during which Indian markets were among the most admired in the world, a combination of global risk-off sentiment, currency pressures, and sector rotation has led to a significant de-rating. “India today is basically a market where people are just not interested in,” he said. “And that is why you find an opportunity today — because the red line has undershot once again. It undershoots once every five or six years.” Critically, the Indian rupee is also undervalued on a real effective exchange rate basis, adding a currency tailwind for international investors entering at current levels. “You’re buying India in terms of equities at the right valuation. And you are obviously buying the Indian currency also at a time when it is undervalued.”
Tyagi presented UTI’s flagship quality-growth strategy — a concentrated portfolio built at the intersection of high-quality businesses and high-growth industries, constructed to outperform MSCI India meaningfully over market cycles. The portfolio’s revenue growth has consistently run three to four percentage points above the benchmark, return on invested capital has been substantially higher, and the portfolio carries a net cash position rather than net debt. He illustrated the approach with two compelling examples: Eternal, India’s equivalent of DoorDash, which commands 60 percent of the country’s food delivery market and has pioneered what he described as a world-first in quick commerce — 10-to-15-minute food and grocery delivery that is already profitable with a 55 percent market share; and Titan, India’s largest organised jewellery company, which after 30 years in business still holds only 9 percent of a market that remains 75 percent unorganised. “In a very steady, editing manner, it has given us 15 to 20 percent growth rate because of one phenomenon — unorganised players ceding share to organised players,” he said of Titan. Of Eternal, he added: “These are the kind of businesses which we like, which have put the proof of concept in front of us, where we can resonate with the massive legs for growth that the industry would have for not just the next three or five years, but for the coming decade.”
When asked about India’s exposure to AI disruption, Tyagi was characteristically measured. “India is more about domestic consumption getting reflected in our various indices,” he said. “We don’t have any direct play on AI.” But he resisted any suggestion that this made India vulnerable. “India had zero play when the internet came around. India wasn’t there in the hardware phase. But does that mean that India could not embark on these technological innovations? The answer is no.” He argued that India’s extraordinary ability to adapt to and deploy technology — exemplified by the India data stack that has transformed government service delivery and financial inclusion — means the country will be a net beneficiary of AI productivity gains without being directly exposed to the valuation risk embedded in AI-heavy indices. “If AI definitely helps improve productivity, Indian businesses would be ready to embrace that. India will not be left out of the net positives that AI will bring.”
Investing in Angola and Trade Finance as Alternative Investment
The summit’s final two sessions broadened the geographical and asset class scope of the day’s conversations significantly. Angélica Eugénia Calembe Paquete of the Fundo Soberano de Angola — Angola’s sovereign wealth fund — presented the investment case for one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most significant but frequently underappreciated economies, covering the FSDEA’s diversification mandate across agriculture, healthcare, mining, and trade finance, including a newly structured USD 300 million trade finance facility launched in Mauritius in partnership with the Trade and Development Bank. Umulinga Karangwa, CFA, of ESATAL within the TDB Group rounded out the programme with a presentation on trade finance funds as an alternative investment class.
A Platform Built for the Long Term
As the summit drew to a close, what struck most forcefully was not any single investment thesis but the quality of the conversation that the day’s programme had generated — a conversation that moved fluidly between the macroeconomic and the behavioural, between the theoretical and the deeply practical, and between the local Mauritian context and the broadest possible global canvas.
Rajiv Lutchmiah’s vision for FinWise has always been more than an events business. It is, as he articulated in his opening remarks, a platform designed to address the asymmetry of information that holds Africa’s investment community back from the recognition it deserves. “We believe the expertise being developed across Africa is world-class and deserves wider recognition,” he said. The 2026 Annual Investment Summit — with its USD 10 billion audience, its five presenting institutions collectively managing over USD 260 billion globally, and its conversations spanning fund-of-funds construction, factor investing, emerging market equity, sovereign wealth, and trade finance — made that case more powerfully than any argument could.
The future of investment management, as the day made clear, will belong neither to the machine nor to the human alone. It will belong to the practitioners who understand both — who can harness the efficiency, the data-processing power, and the discipline of algorithmic systems, while retaining the judgement, the accountability, and the wisdom to know when the model is wrong, when the market is mispriced, and when the most important thing an investment professional can do is simply help a client stay invested.
