Tracing people, helping families

Nikki Jacobs

Over the past six months, Fairheads has developed another value-add service to our list of growing products – tracing services. In addition to the specialisations we can now offer retirement funds in this area, our stand-alone tracing services have an important side benefit of providing jobs for microenterprises and thus contributing to enterprise development in the country.

Logial Progression

An expanded tracing service is a logical progression from the tracing work we have always done over the past three decades in our beneficiary fund and umbrella trust administration services. Here, our fiduciary duty has been to keep in touch with members or beneficiaries, normally via their guardians or caregivers. We have required them to send us a “certificate of existence”. It often happens that people change address or phone numbers and then we have gone out of our way to trace them, acting on a mandate from the board of trustees of the fund in question. Where we have not been able to trace a member using our in-house system, we are mandated to use external tracing service providers. We also pioneered the use of our own field agents who traverse the country, making home visits or enquiring at the local church or police station about the whereabouts of “missing” members. One of our unique strengths is that our employees and partners go beyond the traditional ways of finding members, having gained a solid understanding of the community and employer networks that can be tapped into to make positive connections. These include...

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