From structuring BEE transactions at Standard Bank to navigating the pressures of global healthcare, Mediclinic Group finance chief and 2025 Finance & Technology Award winner Jurgens Myburgh reflects on a target-setting mindset, leadership, legacy and why a winemaker’s parting words sum up his personal philosophy.
Jurgens Myburgh wakes up each morning, checks his smartwatch – sleep score, heart rate variability, VO2 max, body battery – and only then declares himself ready for the day. “I wake up in the morning and my wife asks how I slept,” he laughs. “And I say, ‘I’ll tell you in a minute,’ while I open the app.”
It is, he admits, the technology he cannot live without – and a telling window into his worldview. “It comes back to having a target mentality. I set targets, I set goals, and I seek to achieve them. But the interesting thing is that when you set targets consistently, they eventually stop being targets and become behaviours.”
That philosophy has defined a career that spans investment banking, technology and global healthcare. As group CFO of Mediclinic Group, Jurgens is now entering his 10th year with the organisation, overseeing a business that includes operations in Southern Africa, Switzerland, the UAE and, through its investment in Spire Healthcare, the United Kingdom.
Jurgens grew up in Cape Town before his family relocated to Johannesburg. With an accounting teacher for a mother and a banker for a father, the choice of career felt almost inevitable. “Fairly early on I decided to pursue the qualification of chartered accountant. I felt it would give me a really solid foundation with a broad range of career possibilities.”
After completing his BCom accounting and BCom honours at the University of Johannesburg and writing his board exam in 1998, he completed his articles with KPMG in 2001 before joining Standard Bank Corporate Finance. He would spend 14 years there. “I stayed because I found it thoroughly enjoyable. I loved working in teams, working with really smart people.”
From banking to the boardroom
It was also a period defined by some of the most consequential deals in South African corporate history. He was part of the team that implemented Standard Bank’s own group BEE ownership transaction, known as Project Tutuwa. “Seeing the difference that made in the lives of employees and communities years later was truly fulfilling,” he says.
But those years were not without difficulty. In 2010, Standard Bank announced the retrenchment of more than 2,000 employees. “It was incredibly hard for me personally, but of course the impact on those individuals and the uncertainty it created across the organisation is something that has stayed with me.”
In 2014, Jurgens made his first move into the CFO seat, joining Datatec as group CFO. “It was a role I felt combined my training in financial management and accounting with the skills I had picked up in corporate finance.” With operations in 70 countries, it was a crash course in managing global complexity.
Two years later, in 2016, he moved to Mediclinic. The shift from client-facing banker to group CFO is one he describes as fundamentally about accountability. “The CFO role involves a multitude of things but fundamentally you take direct and immediate ownership of the decisions you make. That sense of accountability is perhaps the most significant difference,” he says. “The overlap between the two, however, is the importance of people and creating a team environment that works together.”
Navigating a healthcare system under pressure
The healthcare landscape, Jurgens notes, is changing fast. “The increased prevalence of chronic disease, coupled with a growing and ageing population, is exacerbated by exponential growth in medical knowledge and technology. These factors together are driving a combination of pricing and regulatory pressure across the industry,” he explains.
Mediclinic’s response has been two-fold: a growth strategy focused on expanding services to encompass prevention, treatment and recovery; and a performance improvement drive targeting savings through organisational design, service delivery, resource planning, external spend and intelligent automation.
One of his more significant achievements at Mediclinic has been the group’s financial transformation initiative. “We held a meeting of all our CFOs and financial managers and identified two key challenges. First, we were not fast enough in our reporting and reporting cadence. Second, our reporting was one-dimensional, it had more data than information.”
The resulting programme was built on four pillars: people, processes, technology and data, covering everything from restructuring team operating models to standardising the group’s chart of accounts. But it needed a team of people working together to achieve it. “I’m eternally grateful and acknowledge every single person that formed part of the team that delivered on this project.”
Ask Jurgens about leadership and he reaches for a definition he has clearly returned to many times: getting people to want to do what needs to get done. It is not, he added, about authority or hierarchy, it is about culture, which he defined as the collective mindset and behaviours of an organisation.
Leadership in the wallpaper
“My CEO at Datatec, Jens Montanana, used to say it ‘sits in the wallpaper’. People come and go, but the culture sits in the wallpaper. And that’s determined in no small way by how leadership shows up,” he adds.
Jurgens also emphasises transparency, empathy and giving everyone a voice. “Our chief executive actively encourages the leadership team to spend time in hospitals walking the wards, engaging with all members of staff. No one understands a job better than the person doing it, and if they’re applying their minds to what they think could be done differently, I want to hear that.”
His other great passion is education. Mediclinic runs dedicated training programmes for its nursing staff. “For me, education is upliftment – at a personal level, yes, but more broadly at a societal level, which generates energy and positivity.”
When the conversation turns to South Africa’s school landscape, funding, for Jurgens, is the obvious answer. But the proportion of the national budget already dedicated to education, he adds, is significant. “So then it becomes about the efficiency with which that’s deployed. And ultimately, when you get down to it, it comes back again to people.”
Listening to his youngest son, currently in grade three, talk about his school day has reinforced the point. “I can hear that his teacher is passionate about teaching him. And that passion matters enormously because teaching is a calling, the same way nursing is a calling.”
Five types of wealth
Outside of work, Jurgens commutes from Somerset West, a drive of between 30 minutes to an hour depending on traffic, which he fills with podcasts from the Financial Times, The Economist and others.
His reading list runs to non-fiction: he singles out The Outsiders by William Thorndike, a study of eight unconventional CEOs and The Everything Store by Brad Stone, which he describes as reading “like a management and leadership training manual, but in a compelling, storytelling way”.
More recently, he has been taken with The Five Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom. “He identifies social wealth, time wealth, mental health, physical health and finally financial health. For me, what ‘good’ looks like is a balanced scorecard across all five of those dimensions.”
Physical health is something he takes seriously. Mountain biking in the Helderberg is a regular fixture, and the data-driven accountability of his smartwatch means he exercises three or four times a week as a matter of routine.
And then there is wine. He is, he clarifies with a smile, an enthusiast rather than a collector: “I drink it rather than store it.” A winemaker recently shared a line that has clearly stayed with him. “He said, ‘I make the wine. You make the moment’. That’s exactly my philosophy. It’s about the experience – the farm, the people you share it with, that connection to a place and a memory.”
Coming back to the concept of social wealth, he concludes, there is something genuinely fulfilling about sharing a good bottle with good friends. For a CFO who measures almost everything – sleep, returns on capital, education outcomes – that is perhaps the one variable he has no interest in quantifying.
