Simon Freemantle is Standard Bank’s Senior Political Economist. He joined the bank in 2008, spending his first two years in the Nairobi office as an East African Analyst. In his current role, Simon is the dedicated South Africa political economist within the bank’s research team, primarily serving both the local and international corporate and institutional investor communities. Over the past decade (2015–2024), Simon has been consistently ranked first in South Africa in the Political Analysis category of the Financial Mail’s Ranking the Analysts Awards. In 2024, Simon ranked first, together with colleagues, in both the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) category, as well as the Innovative Research (Equities and Non-Equities) category.
He has given a course on SA’s political economy to an executive MBA class at the Gordon Institute of Business Science and has presented on SA and African political economy topics at Columbia Business School; Oxford University’s African Studies Centre; Chatham House (London); the Council on Foreign Relations (New York); and the New York University Stern School of Business.
Simon holds a Bachelor of Arts in Law, Honours in International Studies (cum laude), and a Master’s degree in International Relations from the University of Stellenbosch and the University of Amsterdam.
Simon is a Fellow of the African Leadership Initiative – South Africa (ALI SA) and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. He is also a Strategic Advisor to the Centre for Constitutional Values (CCV), a non-profit organisation working to raise and deepen constitutional awareness.
South Africa