Black Belt to help 10X stay ahead of the game

Steven Nathan, CEO of 10X Investments.

Len Brinkman.

10X Investments’ new Chief Operating Officer, Len Brinkman, aims to strengthen the company’s position as “the most innovative company in South Africa’s financial industry”.

The Chartered Accountant and registered Six Sigma Black Belt* sees his role as “optimising people, processes and systems to gear the company for growth”.

10X Investments founder and CEO Steven Nathan says he is excited to have Len’s expertise to help further enhance client experience and scale operations.

At MultiChoice, where he was previously employed for 15 years, Brinkman played a key role in launching operations for DSTV mobile as well as standardising and optimising the operations and customer experience across the various African business units.

Brinkman, who also obtained his Chartered Global Management Accountant qualification with CIMA, says he enjoys working in dynamic environments “applying creativity and ‘out of the box’ thinking to address complex and wide-ranging challenges”.

A newcomer to financial services, Brinkman says: “It is great to have a hand in helping people to retire with dignity … but I am also really excited because 10X is the Google, the Uber of the industry.”

10X, which is disrupting the asset management space, has embraced technology since its launch 10 years ago.

Nathan added: “In addition to making investing simpler, better and cheaper, 10X is also making it easier for people to invest by eliminating the inconvenience of paper-based application forms, Fica documents and faxes by replacing this with online application forms, electronic Fica and signatures.”

*The Six Sigma improvement methodology, which was developed at Motorola in the 1980s and has since been adopted by many other industry leaders from GE to Microsoft, aims to eliminate defects in the production process. The Black Belt is a person who leads complex improvement projects, in other words a turnaround guy.