The shift from financial advising to impact
Employee benefits consultants and financial advisers share an enormous responsibility for helping millions of South Africans on their lifetime savings journeys. This sentiment emerged early on at the 2026 Sanlam Benchmark Survey hybrid launch, as Nick Binedell infused his opening address with retirement anecdotes. “I am in your client sector, and I spend a lot of time thinking about retirement,” said Binedell, the founding director and past dean of the Gordon Institute of Business Science.
Is your income working for you
He introduced the constraint quite elegantly, explaining how everyone in the room faced a tension between working to earn income, and then having that income work for them. The survey is an attempt to measure the country’s progress towards a sustainable retirement, by exploring outcomes among retirement funds and retirement fund members, and reflecting on the impact on the professionals serving the industry. The comprehensive retirement fund industry research polled 76 standalone funds, 130 umbrella fund employers, 30 pensioners who retired four to five years ago and 600 consumers nearing or in retirement.
Rather than obsess over the headline findings, FAnews dived straight into the presentation discussing advice gaps in the retirement funding landscape. This was approached in a question and answer format delivered by Nomawetu Msutwana, Principal Benefit Consultant at Simeka Consultants and Actuaries, and Denisha Subjee, Corporate Relationship Executive at Graviton. The presenters challenged attendees to rethink financial advice as a journey from the very first day a member joins a fund all the way through to post-retirement, before posing a series of member-centric advice-related questions.
Have you had access to any form of advice? Who imparted that advice? Was the first advice you received personalised to your particular situation? And are you still 100% comfortable that you are on track to retire? As an aside, the exercise of posing and answering these types of questions ‘as if you were a client or member’ could produce some valuable insights for the advisers and financial planners among FAnews’ readers.
To realign this to the presentation stream, the thinking centres around how to shift the discussion from financial advising to the member’s experience of it. “The advice gap is not in access, but impact,” Msutwana said, before noting that the financial advice ‘need’ cannot be met by retirement funds sending more information to members. The emerging role requires helping members translate this information into appropriate financial behaviour.
Advice function over outcome
The advice gap was in part due to a focus on function over outcome. “Advisers are focused on providing high quality, personalised advice to one member at a time; trustees are focused on ensuring fair and consistent outcomes to a broad member base; and members are navigating real-life challenges around complexity and affordability,” Subjee said. This sounded very much like the siloed approach that large financial institutions are so wary of filtering down to the advice level; all stakeholders are hard at work but in their own lanes.
Results from the latest survey suggested that consumers were not getting advice early enough and that the advice they were getting lacked personalisation and consistency. “Advice should be seen as an ongoing service that a member receives throughout their journey,” Subjee said. In practice, this would require suitable solutioning across important life stages, including when a member joins the fund; during the career and wealth-building stage; planning for retirement; at retirement; and post-retirement. If a member receives suitable advice through each of these stages, the advice gap could be considered closed.
Closing the advice gap means designing a journey that supports a member at each of these life stages rather than leaving members to seek financial advice whenever a crisis occurs. Referring back to the survey results, the presenters shared that a large share of members wanted their retirement education to start from 20 to 30 years before retirement. Unfortunately, the system works in such a way that the first meaningful advice interaction occurs much later. This realisation allowed the discussion to segue into the survey finding that retirement fund members were combining advice sources.
The ChatGPT and Google conundrum
When asked where they usually go for information about a financial product, 52% mentioned their own financial adviser, broker or benefit counsellor; 39% said they used online searches such as Google, YouTube or AI tools; 36% used product provider websites; and 33% turned to their employer, HR or people linked to work benefits. The concern was that too many members were relying on ‘always on’ AI models and search engines rather than seeking professional advice. This approach speaks to advice-at-need rather than advice as an ongoing journey.
Subjee reiterated that advice should evolve through the member journey. At 35, advice is about building a solid foundation, especially maximising your retirement fund contributions to benefit from three decades of compound growth. At 45, advice shifts to accumulation, and the adviser plays more of a behavioural role to ensure that members stay invested and minimise lifestyle inflation. And by 60, advice becomes more holistic, focusing on sustainability through capital preservation and estate planning.
The survey showed a significant drop-off in members’ confidence the nearer they got to their proposed retirement date. Only 41% of Gen X (ages 46-61) believed they were on track to save enough for retirement, while 48% expected to be able to maintain their lifestyle in retirement. One way to address these issues is to ensure that members are advised in the right format, and at the right time.
Seeking a holistic retirement solution
“The solution here is a low-cost institutional channel that reaches members at every point, with retail advice preserved for those moments of higher complexity,” Subjee said. But a holistic solution demands putting better fund defaults in place, nudging members towards the right behaviours and improved execution across both the fund administration and trustee roles. The argument here was that fund-level strategy that is not implemented, monitored and reviewed will fall short.
A challenge that many financial advisers face is that of clients who have left their retirement planning too late. The presenter suggested that the retirement savings engine was still a powerful tool for late starters. “The key to success here is to implement a coordinated strategy with discipline,” Subjee suggested, offering four possible actions. The first part was for members to gradually increase their retirement fund contributions to reach the 27.5% tax-deductible contribution ceiling.
The second was to seek a targeted financial needs analysis, perhaps every five years, to stay on track. Step three was to consider a comprehensive financial review to give members a view of their debt position, repayment trajectories and whether their capital accumulation was on track to fund living expenses in retirement, including medical expenses. And step four was to enable members to arrive at a debt-free position one year prior to reaching their normal retirement age.
Closing the advice gap
The parting message to advisers and retirement funds was that members were hungry for actionable communication. “Members want advice that is earlier, simpler, practical and more personal; institutional advice gives retirement systems scale and consistency, but it is not enough on its own to deliver impact,” Msutwana concluded.
Her view was echoed by Subjee, who said that closing the advice gap required coordination between institutional and retail advice. She said the industry needed a joint advice framework that gives a clearer indication of who advises on what, and when. The future is connecting institutional guidance with personalised, actionable and timely advice.
Writer’s thoughts:
One of the frightening stats from this presentation was how many consumers are turning to AI, Google or YouTube for financial information. Are you concerned about this trend, and what can advisers and planners do to reassert the value of professional advice? Please comment below, interact with us on X at @fanews_online or email us your thoughts [email protected].
