Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily Meets from the BBC World Service. This is where we bring you in-depth interviews with people in business from across the globe. Today, it's the turn of Sim Chabalala. He's the South African CEO of one of the continent's biggest banks, Standard Bank in Johannesburg.

Standard Bank today is the largest financial institution on the continent.

We have assets of $170 billion.

We're in 20 countries on our beloved continent.

Sim shares his journey from his childhood, in apartheid era Soweto to becoming an investment banker.

The townships were aflame. There were boycotts. You know, driving to school used to be quite an exercise.

That's Sim Shabalala here on Business Daily on the BBC World Service.

Sim Shabalala was born in the rural South African province of Kwasulu Natal and raised in the

township of Soweto. This was during the era of apartheid, the policy of racial segregation

enforcing all-white rule on South Africans, which ran up to the early 1990s.

The policies led to decades of violence and economic struggle, but despite this, Sim's parents

worked hard to send him to a mostly white Catholic school in the outskirts of Johannesburg.

In the height of the struggle, actually, I matriculated in 1985.

So you can imagine the townships were aflame.

There were boycotts.

You know, driving to school used to be quite an exercise.

And I've often told people that I've always been an outsider as a consequence.

You know, I was an outsider in Soweto, in the township,

because there I was going to a white school, as it then was. At school, I was an outsider

because I was one of a handful of black kids at this upper middle class school in Observatory in Johannesburg.

After leaving school, Sim went on to study at Rhodes University,

where he hoped to become a lawyer.

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