Camissa Asset Management Review - Halal Finance Products

Camissa Asset Management began in 2001 as Kagiso Asset Management, a joint venture between the Kagiso Group and Coronation Fund Managers, and built its name as an independent, valuation-driven active manager. In February 2022 the business was renamed Camissa (from the Khoi name for Cape Town's sweet waters) when management and staff acquired 74% ownership, with Sinayo Capital, a black-women-owned investor, holding 26%; the firm reports 30% black women ownership overall. The Islamic franchise dates to 13 July 2009, when the Islamic Equity Fund launched under the Kagiso banner, and has since grown past R11 billion across four funds, making Camissa the second-largest force in SA halal investing by fund assets.

The range covers the core needs with unusual pricing discipline. The Islamic Equity Fund (R3.45 billion at 21 July 2026) runs a Shariah-screened SA equity mandate at a 1.04% B-class TER. The Islamic Balanced Fund (about R5.26 billion) is a Regulation 28 high-equity multi-asset portfolio, also at 1.04% on the B class, making it the cheapest actively managed halal balanced fund in the country and the natural rival to Old Mutual Albaraka's R7.3 billion flagship. The Islamic High Yield Fund (R2.73 billion) is the standout: a 0.58% TER income vehicle built from sukuk and Islamic income instruments. An Islamic Global Equity Feeder rounds out the shelf for offshore exposure.

The High Yield Fund deserves specific attention because it solves SA halal investing's hardest problem: what to do with defensive money when bonds and deposits are haram. Camissa's team has publicly documented its sukuk activity, including buying longer-dated SA government rand sukuk at profit rates around 13.5% in the window before the 2024 election, when conventional yields spiked. Because the 2023 domestic sovereign sukuk was sold to institutional buyers, funds like this are effectively the only route through which ordinary South Africans participate in their government's sukuk program. At 0.58% the fund also prices below Old Mutual Albaraka's income fund B1 class (0.59%) while running a more yield-seeking mandate.

The investment process is genuinely differentiated: Camissa is a contrarian, valuation-driven house that sizes positions where it sees mispricing rather than tracking the benchmark's shape. Applied inside Shariah screens (AAOIFI business-activity and financial-ratio standards, zero interest-bearing instruments) this can produce meaningful deviation from the FTSE/JSE Shari'ah indices and from peers, which cuts both ways: stronger long-run results if the process works, uncomfortable tracking gaps in momentum years. Investors choosing Camissa should be choosing the process, not just the price.

Governance is competent but under-published. Every MDD names the Shariah advisory and supervisory board (Mufti Zubair Bayat, Mufti Ahmed Suliman, Maulana Muhammed Carr, all senior figures who also serve on other SA Islamic finance boards) and states AAOIFI compliance with a prohibition on interest-bearing instruments. What is missing, relative to the Old Mutual Albaraka gold standard, is the published paper trail: no signed annual certificate on the public site, no disclosed external Shariah audit, and purification amounts are not broken out per distribution on the crawled fact sheets. Nothing in the crawl suggests a compliance problem; the gap is disclosure depth, and strict investors should request the Shariah certificate directly from Camissa before investing. Balancing price, scale, sukuk capability and named scholars against that disclosure gap, Camissa still presents the strongest overall value proposition in SA halal fund management today.