Old Mutual Albaraka Review - Halal Finance Products

The Old Mutual Albaraka franchise is the product of a durable joint venture between Old Mutual Unit Trusts, part of the JSE-listed insurance and investment group, and Al Baraka Bank South Africa, the Durban-based Islamic bank majority owned by Bahrain's Al Baraka Group. When the Old Mutual Albaraka Equity Fund launched on 1 June 1992, South Africa had no Islamic banking act, no ASISA Shariah category and no competing product: it was the first Islamic unit trust in the country and among the earlier ones globally. That 34-year continuity matters, because the fund has been screened, purified and certified through every market regime since the end of apartheid.

The range is deliberately narrow: three funds covering equity growth, balanced retirement saving and income. The Equity Fund (R3.5 billion, February 2026) runs a Shariah-screened SA equity mandate benchmarked against SA general equity peers. The Balanced Fund (R7.3 billion, April 2026) is the franchise flagship and the largest Shariah unit trust in South Africa, running a Regulation 28 compliant multi-asset high-equity mandate where the defensive sleeve uses sukuk and Shariah-compliant liquid instruments instead of bonds and cash deposits. The Income Fund (R2.0 billion, February 2026) reached scale within five years of launch and gives conservative savers and retirees a purified yield instrument at a 0.59% B1 TER, a price point that undercuts many conventional income funds.

Governance is where the franchise leads the market. The Shari'ah Supervisory Board comprises Shaykh MS Omar (a Durban-based attorney and Islamic finance jurist), Mufti Zubair Bayat (Ameer of the Darul Ihsan Centre) and Mufti Shafique Jakhura (Darul Ihsan Centre, also on the Camissa board). The board meets quarterly and its process is unusually well documented: it reviews the screened investable universe's core business activities and financial ratios, receives an external Shariah compliance audit report, reviews updated compliance certificates for non-equity instruments, and signs an annual compliance certificate applying AAOIFI Shari'ah Standards. The certificate dated 8 April 2026, covering the year ended 31 December 2025, is published on Al Baraka's CDN and names the scholars. The external audit layer, distinct from the board's own review, is rare in SA fund management and is the reason we describe this as the assurance benchmark.

Purification is handled with matching discipline. Incidental non-permissible income (for example, interest embedded in screened companies' balance sheets) is quantified and paid to a charitable trust elected by the board, and does not form part of investor distributions. Old Mutual publishes the purification amounts alongside distributions, so investors can see exactly what was stripped out. For investors who take purification seriously, this per-distribution disclosure is materially better practice than managers who handle purification silently or not at all.

The critical case against the franchise is about ambition rather than quality. Pricing is fair but not leading: Class A TERs of 1.75% (equity) and 1.47% (balanced) are what a direct retail investor pays, and while B1 classes at 1.29% and 1.19% are competitive, they generally require platform or adviser access. Camissa undercuts every class with 1.04% flagships and a 0.58% income fund. The shelf has not grown: there is no global equity feeder, no Shariah RA wrapper of its own (the funds slot into third-party RAs), no property vehicle. And the R30 monthly administration charge on small direct accounts without debit orders is an avoidable irritation for the smallest savers. None of this undermines the core proposition: three clean building blocks with the best-documented compliance in the country, sized and distributed so that virtually every SA retirement platform can accommodate a halal portfolio built from them.