Did you hear? Beyers Chocolates, the owner of the iconic Sweetie Pie brand, has officially entered liquidation.
This week in Seed Analytics Advisor Connect:
Upcoming events: Network & earn CPD points.
Hidden capacity: 3 stats to check every month.
See what you can manage with the right data.
New opportunities & jobs for you to explore in SA.
AI's polished errors & the hidden sanctions trap.
Prompt: Your own brokerage health scorecard.
Take Note
CPD Webinar – Online 5 May 10:00 AM: Deep dive into the Section 24C allowance for future expenditure on contracts, following SARS's updated Interpretation Note 78. 1.5 CPD points, R220. Essential for advisors dealing with complex contract structures. Info here.
Financing Your Business – JHB 11 May 4:30 PM: Free monthly investor networking at La Salud, Sandton. Meet venture capitalists, as well as new and established business owners. 60–75 attendees per event. Get in free.
The dashboard your brokerage MD should check every month
3 Stats that let you know if you’re on the right track…
Most brokerage owners check their AUM once a month, glance at revenue once a quarter and only think about client retention when someone leaves.
This monthly dashboard review can surface problems before they become crises, and give your management meeting the data it needs to drive new growth through your broker force:
1. Net flows by advisor
Total AUM tells you the size of your business. Net flows tell you whether it's growing or slowly bleeding out. And breaking it down by advisor tells you where the growth or loss is actually happening.
The check: Each month, review the net inflows and outflows per advisor for the prior period. You're looking for two things: advisors consistently bringing in new money (that's your growth engine) and advisors showing steady outflows without corresponding new business (that's a retention or activity problem you need to catch early).
2. Revenue concentration risk
Most brokerages have a version of the same problem: A handful of clients (or a single advisor's book) generating a disproportionate share of total revenue. That's not success; it's fragility.
The check: Look at what percentage of your total revenue comes from your top 10 client families. If it's above 30%, you have a concentration risk that a single departure could seriously damage. Now check it per advisor; if one advisor's book represents more than 25% of your brokerage revenue, that's a key-person risk that directly affects your valuation.
3. Orphaned activity (the no-touch list)
This is the one most MDs don't track at all, and it's arguably the most important. How many clients in your book have had zero advisor contact in the last 90 days?
The check: Pull a list of clients with no logged meetings, calls or emails in the past quarter. These are your "orphaned" clients; still on your book, still generating revenue, but receiving no proactive service. Every one of them is a retention risk, a TCF risk and a missed opportunity for reviews, upsells and referrals. If your number is higher than 15–20% of your book, it could indicate a capacity or allocation problem in your team.
Bonus: Bring this dashboard to your monthly management meeting. When your leadership team can see which advisors are growing, where concentration risk is building and which clients are being neglected, the conversation shifts from reactive firefighting to proactive growth planning.
It turns your broker force into a data-informed sales engine.
Join the conversation…
How often do you check your brokerage's key numbers?
You can't manage what you can't see
The three checks in the article above sound simple. But for most brokerages, pulling net flows by advisor, revenue concentration by client family or a list of untouched clients means hours of spreadsheet wrangling across multiple platforms.
Seed Analytics' book reports give you these answers without the manual work. With consolidated data from over 70 investment platforms, your online dashboard surfaces all the data you need in minutes.
Already on Seed?
Use your book reports to run this month's three checks in your next management meeting.
New to Seed?
Featured Section
New wealth and fin advisory career opportunities in SA
Retirement Funds New Business Specialist (JHB) @ Knights Insurance Brokers
Financial Advisor (DBN) @ Berghshire Wealth
Financial Advisor (DBN) @ Confiar BlueStar
Manager: Private Clients (CPT) @ Moore SA
Financial Advisor (Paarl) @ Metropolitan
Financial Advisor (CPT) @ Advisek
Financial Advisor (DNB) @ EQ-FIN
In Case You Missed It…
Industry Roundup
The Problem with Polished Errors. AI has become a powerful research co-pilot, but its biggest strength, confidence, is also its greatest risk. AI-generated investment research often sounds authoritative even when factually wrong, from misidentifying competitors to flagging data on the wrong date.
Death Benefit Dilemmas. Administering death benefits remains one of the most litigated areas of the Pension Funds Act, and industry experts warn that an equal split is not always fair. Trustees are legally required to investigate financial dependency, household income and future earning potential, not just follow a nomination form.
The Retirement Riddle. Sanlam Umbrella Solutions has hit R150 billion in AUM, but the real headline from their latest Corporate Leaders briefing is the retirement readiness gap: only 6 in 100 South African retirees currently save enough for a 75% replacement ratio.
The Hidden Sanctions Trap. Morningstar has identified 800,000 instances of sanctions exposure buried within global mutual funds and ETFs, often several layers deep. Regulators are no longer just looking for violations; they want to see that asset managers have a proactive sanctions framework.
The Rise of the Total Equity Solution. A new trend in portfolio construction is gaining traction: Single-fund "total equity" vehicles that combine local, global, active and passive into one holding. While these funds remove tactical decision-making for the advisor, they raise questions about conviction dilution.
Prompt of the week
If you want a ready-made dashboard for your brokerage...
Today’s feature describes three stats every MD should track monthly. This prompt gets AI to build you a custom scoring template you can fill in yourself, with built-in thresholds and red flags, so you know exactly what "good" and "bad" looks like for each metric.
How to use it:
Describe your brokerage's basic structure (number of advisors, approximate total AUM band, service model).
Paste the prompt into any AI tool.
Use the output as a blank scorecard template you populate with your own data offline.
Important: Do not upload any client data, revenue figures, AUM numbers or flow data into the AI tool. This prompt generates a framework only. You fill in the numbers yourself.
The Prompt:
You are a practice management consultant for independent financial advisory brokerages in South Africa, familiar with FAIS regulation and FSCA oversight.
I want you to build me a monthly brokerage health dashboard template I can review at each management meeting. My brokerage has the following structure:
Number of advisors: [e.g. "6"]
Approximate AUM band: [e.g. "R500m–R1bn" or "R1bn–R2bn"]
Service model: [e.g. "Tiered: Essentials, Premium, Ultimate" or "Flat service for all clients"]
Using this structure, generate:
A blank scorecard table with rows for: net flows by advisor, revenue concentration (top 10 client families as % of total), key-person risk (single advisor's share of total revenue), and orphaned clients (no contact in 90+ days). For each row, include columns for: the metric, a space for me to fill in my number, the recommended healthy threshold, and a Red / Amber / Green rating guide.
Suggested healthy thresholds for a brokerage of my size and structure, with a brief explanation of where each threshold comes from.
A list of 3 early warning signs I should watch for each metric, i.e. what pattern over 2–3 months would tell me something is going wrong before it becomes a crisis.
A suggested monthly review checklist I can follow to assess all four metrics consistently, formatted for use in a management meeting.
Format the output so I can print it or paste it into a spreadsheet. Keep it practical and concise.
Did You Know? On 30 April, 1993, the directors of CERN released the source code of the World Wide Web into the public domain at the urging of its creator, Tim Berners-Lee. With no licensing fees or restrictions, the internet became freely available to anyone.
Till next time,
Seed Analytics Advisor Connect
Did someone forward you this newsletter? Subscribe to it here.