Fidelity Investments has opened an office in Sandton, South Africa to target high net worth individuals. The office will be run by Dirk Tiem...

Fidelity Investments has opened an office in Sandton, South Africa to target high net worth individuals. The office will be run by Dirk Tiemann who previously worked for Fidelity in Frankfurt for nine years. With its new South African operation, Fidelity aim to sharply increase the $700 million of South African assets under management that it had gathered through marketing agent, Stanlib, the joint venture between South African financial heavy weights, Standard Bank and Liberty. Fidelity runs more than 300 mutual funds globally but will be offering a suite of 80 funds to South African investors. Mr Tiemann said: “South Africa is looking strong economically and exchange controls have been loosened for institutional investors. We hope that they will be loosened further and that we will be able to put South Africans into our many funds.” “One of our main aims is to give better support to our existing distributors. We also want to highlight the benefits of geographic diversification, to lower the risk and increase the return, despite the unhappy experiences of South Africans in foreign investments in the past few years.” Fidelity has world-wide assets under management of over $1 trillion.