True South Actuaries & Consultants

Innovative solutions for the traditional actuarial marketplace

True South embodies a philosophy of helping our clients to navigate through an increasingly complex and ever-changing global financial services maze from a truly South African perspective.

As actuaries we are skilled in a broad range of disciplines in the financial services field; as consultants we are acutely aware of the need for professional guidance in an evolving economy in the Global Village.

As such True South prides itself in keeping abreast of changes affecting our clients, not impetuously accepting the status quo of doing business and seeing beyond the obvious and through the clutter.

At True South we thrive on challenging the norm, managing uncertainty and solving your problems! A brief overview of our business can be found on our fact sheet.

"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail."

"When I'm working on a problem, I never think of the beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."

What's In a Name?

True South is the direction of the axis around which planet Earth rotates. It sounds relatively easy to find, but is in fact not. Due to the motion of the ions within our planet's liquid core, Earth acts like a giant magnet and is therefore surrounded by a magnetic field with north and south poles. The axis of this magnet-effect differs from the axis of Earth's rotation by approximately 11 degrees, and as such the geographical and magnetic poles at any end of the scale are not located in the same place.

A manual compass is guided by Earth's magnetic field, and explorers therefore need to take this natural deviation into account when assessing true direction.

Geographically, compass North is in fact 1 300 kilometres from true North — a figure that jumps to a staggering 2 550 kilometres in the case of true South.

To complicate matters even further, Earth's magnetic field is not constant but changes over time. The poles are not fixed geographical points as it can move up to 80 kilometres daily due to variations and magnetic storms. In fact, recent geological surveys have found that the magnetic North Pole is slowly shifting in a north-westerly direction at 40 kilometres per year — a phenomena known as Magnetic Pole Wandering.

And to top all this, Earth's magnetic field also changes its direction approximately every 500 000 years. There have indeed been at least 171 north-south pole reversals over the past 75 million years!

Because of this ongoing change, it is virtually impossible to predict the direction of Earth's magnetic field at any given point in the distant future. New observations must continuously be made and models generated to accurately represent the magnetic field as it truly is at a specific point in time.

As with Mother Nature, economies and business change over time — sometimes predictably and sometimes surprisingly — and therefore True South Actuaries and Consultants (Pty) Ltd embodies a philosophy of helping our clients to navigate an increasingly complex and ever-changing global financial services maze from a truly South African perspective.