Local vs Global: Is Your Pension Quietly Burning Your Money?
- Dec 5, 2025
- 4 min read
If you work in Africa’s finance world long enough, you start to see the same pattern.
Two people. Same salary. Same contribution rate. Same number of years saving.
On paper, they’re doing everything “right”.
Yet when retirement finally arrives, their outcomes are miles apart.
One has a portfolio that still buys real things – school fees, healthcare, travel, dignity. The other has a statement full of big numbers that don’t stretch nearly as far as they should.
The difference often isn’t effort, discipline or intelligence.
It’s structure.
It’s whether their money spent decades growing in a mix of local and global assets… or quietly burning in a portfolio concentrated in one country, one currency and one economy.
The comfort – and danger – of “home bias”
For most African investors and pension members, “home bias” is the default.
It feels sensible:
You understand your own banks, telcos and government.
You know the currency.
You can follow the local news.
But in practice, a 90–100% local portfolio is not “safe”. It’s a macro bet on your home country.
When everything is local, everything is exposed to the same shocks:
A sudden currency devaluation
A spike in inflation
A change in tax or capital controls
A sovereign downgrade or restructuring
You might hold a mix of cash, bonds and shares – but if they all sit in the same currency, under the same policies, you’re not diversified.
You’re concentrated.
And concentration is exactly what turns “good-looking” nominal returns into disappointing real outcomes.
The two silent thieves: inflation and FX
There are two forces almost every African investor has met personally:
1. Inflation You see it at the supermarket long before you see it in an actuarial report. If your pension grows 10% on paper but prices rise 12%, your “growth” is actually a 2% loss in purchasing power.
2. Currency moves Many goals – education abroad, medical treatment, global travel, even imports – are effectively priced in hard currency. If your local currency falls 30–40% over a few years, anything you plan to pay for in dollars, euros or pounds just became dramatically more expensive.
A purely local portfolio is fully exposed to both.
You don’t feel it day to day. You really feel it over 10, 20, 30 years.
That’s what “burning your money” looks like in slow motion.
What global investments really add (it’s not about abandoning home)
Global investing is not an escape from risk. It is a decision to spread risk, not stack it.
Three things global exposure can add, alongside local assets:
Currency diversification Holding part of a portfolio in hard currencies (USD, EUR, GBP and others) means that when your home currency weakens, that slice often rises in local terms. It acts as a counterweight.
Different economic cycles and sectors Many African markets are dominated by a handful of sectors – banks, telcos, resources. Global markets add technology, healthcare, global consumer brands, infrastructure, and more. They don’t all move in lockstep with your local economy.
More tools against inflation Global bond markets, inflation-linked securities, real-asset strategies and diversified equity funds give you more levers to protect long-term purchasing power than local instruments alone.
Crucially, this is not “local OR global”.
It is local AND global – using the rest of the world to support your home market exposure, not to replace it.
Why structure and plumbing matter
For individuals, the change might be as simple as:
Asking where your pension is actually invested (in plain language).
Checking how much sits in a single country and currency.
Ensuring at least part of your long-term savings has regulated global exposure.
For institutions – banks, asset managers, pension funds, insurers – the challenge is more complex:
They must meet local regulation and prudential limits.
They must manage liquidity in local currency.
They must deliver outcomes to clients and members that survive local shocks.
That requires more than a few offshore funds bolted onto the side.
It requires infrastructure – the digital plumbing that can:
Connect local markets, regional markets and global custodians.
Keep a single, look-through ledger of every client and every position.
Provide regulators with clear, timely reporting of currency, duration and issuer risks.
How Verī Platform fits into this picture
This is where the Veri Platform operates – quietly, behind the scenes, behind regulated institutions rather than in front of retail investors.
On Verī, a bank, asset manager, pension fund or insurer can:
Hold local government bonds, local corporates and domestic equities alongside pan-African and global investments in one environment.
Work with multiple local and offshore custodians while maintaining one consolidated, reconciled view of every member or client account.
Generate regulator-friendly reports that make it easier for supervisors to see and understand cross-border exposures instead of fearing them.
Veri doesn’t tell anyone what to buy. It simply makes local + global doable, auditable and transparent at scale.
One simple question
The world will continue to deliver elections, droughts, commodity shocks, new taxes, currency swings and policy surprises.
No platform can stop that.
What you can influence is where your money sits when those shocks arrive – concentrated on the “burning” side of the screen, or deliberately spread across local and global opportunities.
So the next time you look at your statement, or sit in a trustee meeting, ask a different kind of question:
Is your pension doing the same? Is it combining local strength with global diversification to protect you from inflation and currency risk – or is it quietly burning your money while the numbers on the page go up?
That answer matters far more than any single year’s return.
#africaninvestors #pension #retirementplanning #globalinvesting #diversification #inflationrisk #currencyrisk #wealthprotection #assetmanagement #VeriPlatform #africafinance
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