Biography

Adrian holds a Professorship in Economics, Finance & Strategy at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS), where he is the Founding Director of the Centre for African Management and Markets (CAMM). He is the author of the Visa Africa Integration Index (2012 - 2020) and the Investec-GIBS Savings Index (2015 - 2020), and has worked in many markets, from Brazil to Singapore. Since 2017, Adrian has chaired the investment committee of MeTTa Capital’s venture capital fund. He also holds a visiting professorship in Strategic Management at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, Canada.   

Over the past twenty-five years, alongside his academic career, Adrian established and grew an investment firm which was sold to a listed entity in 2017. In 2021 he joined a family investment office to launch their multi-asset investment portfolio alongside a special opportunities portfolio. In 2023 Adrian returned to his entrepreneurial roots to build Boundless World, an advisory firm focused on capital markets, business model innovation, and growth strategy.  

Adrian holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) (cum laude), MCom (cum laude) and a PhD (Economics) for which he was awarded the Economics Society of South Africa’s Founders Medal. He is a UNESCO laureate, a matriculant of Linacre College (Oxford) and has completed programmes in Capital Markets at New York’s Columbia University; competitive strategy at Harvard Business School in Boston; Machine Learning at Stanford; Financial Markets at Yale; and Game Theory at the University of British Columbia.   

Adrian is a member of various industry bodies, including the Academy of International Business, the Strategic Management Society, and Investment Analysts Society.