27four Investment Managers 27four Shariah Living Annuity (27four Life)

27four Investment Managers was founded in 2007 by Fatima Vawda, a mathematician by training, and took its name from 27 April 1994, the date of South Africa's first democratic election: transformation is written into the brand. The firm launched Shariah-compliant portfolios in 2008, initially for institutional and retirement clients, and built its reputation as a multi-manager: rather than picking stocks itself, it selects, combines and monitors underlying asset managers. Applied to the halal market, this created something no one else offers in SA retail: a single fund that diversifies across the country's Shariah managers.

The flagship is the 27four Shari'ah Balanced Prescient Fund of Funds, roughly R710 million, a Regulation 28 compliant multi-asset portfolio that allocates across underlying Shariah-compliant funds spanning equity, sukuk, Islamic income and commodity exposures. The multi-manager structure produces a governance double-layer that strict investors should appreciate: each underlying fund answers to its own manager's Shariah board, and 27four's external Shari'ah Supervisory Board then approves which funds and instruments the FoF may hold at all. The fund charges no performance fee and reported a 1.55% TER at 31 March 2026, reasonable for a FoF, though structurally it can never undercut a lean single-manager balanced fund like Camissa's at 1.04%.

The single-manager 27four Shari'ah Active Equity Prescient Fund is the growth option, with an expense ratio around 1.86% per Morningstar's history and a R10,000 minimum. It is the range's weak spot on price and scale. The October 2024 launch of the 27four Shari'ah Income Prescient Fund matters more strategically: targeting 110% of STeFI from sukuk and Islamic income instruments, it completed the conservative end of the range so that a full halal glide path (equity, balanced, income) can now be built entirely inside 27four wrappers. The life-wrapped Shari'ah Wealth Builder Fund extends the same portfolios into Discovery's umbrella retirement funds, putting 27four's halal offering in front of ordinary workplace savers, a distribution channel none of the boutique rivals reach.

Governance rests on an external, independent Shari'ah Supervisory Board: Mufti Ahmed Suliman (Chairman), who completed the Aalim course at Darul Uloom Zakariyya in 2002 and serves widely across SA takaful and Islamic finance boards, with Mufti Mohammed Ashraf and Mufti Zaid Haspatel, both also Darul Uloom Zakariyya trained. The board approves the collective investment schemes and instruments the portfolios may hold. The gap versus best practice is publication: Old Mutual Albaraka and Element publish signed annual compliance certificates on public pages, while 27four's compliance documentation lives in product brochures. The scholars are credible and named; the paper trail could be more public.

The firm's record has independent validation: six Raging Bull awards between 2014 and 2016, four Morningstar awards and the 2009 Manager of Managers award, alongside growth into a group spanning South Africa and the UK with fund hosting and private markets capabilities. The honest overall assessment: 27four is not the cheapest, biggest or oldest halal manager in SA, but it is the only one solving the concentration problem, and its board structure, award history and transformation credentials make it a serious core holding for investors who think in terms of manager risk rather than just fees.