Did you hear? PPS allocated a record R6.88 billion in profit share to its members for 2025, up 29% from the previous year’s record. For some members, their annual allocation actually exceeded their total premiums paid.
This week in Seed Analytics Advisor Connect:
Upcoming events: Chances to network & earn CPD points.
Paperwork audit: What to delegate, automate and drop.
Clear the admin backlog with data you don't have to chase.
New opportunities & jobs for you to explore right here in SA.
Food price spike, the RAF in trouble & the great bond pivot.
Prompt of the week: Sort your admin into 3 buckets, fast.
Take Note
FPI Succession Planning – Online 19 May: Free webinar on succession planning for financial planning professionals. CPD points included (and a reminder that 31 May is the deadline for the current annual CPD cycle). Register here.
What to delegate, what to automate, what to drop?
A practical framework for clearing the paperwork that's blocking your growth…
Many advisors aren't struggling to find new clients; they're struggling to service them. The onboarding queue builds up because recurring admin on existing clients is eating every available hour.
The fix isn't working harder. It's sorting every recurring task into one of three buckets…
1. Delegate: tasks that need to be done, but not by you
FICA document collection is the classic example. You need to collect and verify client IDs, proof of address and source-of-funds documentation, plus keep it updated. But you don't need to be the one chasing a client for an updated utility bill.
Create a checklist of what's needed per client type (individual, trust, company), hand it to your PA with a standard follow-up email template, and let them manage the collection. You sign off at the end, not at every step.
More quick wins: Provider follow-ups on outstanding requirements, statement requests and meeting scheduling. If you're still doing any of these yourself, that's advisor-level time on admin-level work.
2. Automate: tasks that are repetitive and rule-based
Records of Advice are a good place to start. Under FAIS, every piece of advice needs a documented ROA covering the client's needs, the products considered, and why you recommended what you did. Most advisors write these from scratch after every meeting.
Instead, build a templated record of advice in your CRM with pre-populated fields and dropdown selections for recommendation rationale. You fill in the specifics; the structure is already done.
Other automations worth setting up: Annual review reminders triggered by anniversary dates, contribution nudges, compliance diary entries and milestone messages. This is also where Seed Analytics’ Consolidated Statements are incredible time-savers. Set them up once, and they run while you focus on advice.
3. Drop: tasks you're just doing out of habit
This is the uncomfortable one. Start with manually compiling client reports that your platform already generates. Many advisors spend hours building portfolio summaries in Excel when they could use an investment platform’s own automated reports that are more accurate and more detailed.
If you're duplicating what the system already does, stop.
Other candidates: Double-capturing client data across systems that don't sync, printing documents that exist digitally, and preparing internal reports nobody reads. If you stopped doing it tomorrow and nobody noticed, it's gone.
Join the conversation…
Be honest, what really happens when FICA docs are due?
Clear the backlog with data you don't have to chase
The framework above works best when you're not spending hours gathering the information you need to act on. If auditing your book means logging into multiple platforms, pulling separate statements, and reconciling data in spreadsheets, the "delegate, automate, drop" exercise becomes another task on the pile.
Seed Analytics gives you a consolidated view of every client's AUM, product mix and revenue contribution across 70+ investment platforms in one place. That means your PA can pull what they need to manage FICA follow-ups and provider chasing without coming to you, your ROA templates can reference accurate, up-to-date portfolio data, and you can spot the manual reports worth dropping because Seed already generates them.
Less time gathering data. More time onboarding the clients who are waiting.
Already on Seed? Run a book report this week and identify which manual processes your platform already handles, then drop them.
New to Seed?
Featured Section
New wealth and fin advisory career opportunities in SA
Retirement Funds New Business Specialist (JHB) @ Knights Insurance Brokers
Broker Sales Advisor (Centurion) @ Momentum
Manager: Private Clients (CPT) @ Moore SA
Broker Consultant (Umhlanga) @ Sanlam
Financial Advisor (DBN) @ Confiar BlueStar
Offshore Specialist: Glacier (CPT) @ Sanlam
Executive Financial Advisor (Midrand) @ Accsure Wealth
In Case You Missed It…
Industry Roundup
Food Price Spike Incoming. Boxer CEO Hilton Tarrant warned this week that food price increases are coming. Retailers absorbed the April diesel shock temporarily, but the inventory lag is ending. Expect a 7% to 9% jump in staple baskets from June.
RAF Slapped with R2.2m Punitive Order. The High Court ordered the Road Accident Fund to pay a pedestrian R2.2 million after the fund tried to refuse payment because the victim's medical aid had already covered part of the costs. The court called it obstructive. Another reminder that the RAF is increasingly unreliable as a safety net.
The Living Annuity Beneficiary Trap. If a living annuity holder dies without a nominated beneficiary, the capital gets paid into the deceased's estate as a lump sum. It stays exempt from estate duty, but the executor can levy a 3.5% fee plus VAT. A simple nomination form avoids this entirely.
The Great Bond Pivot. SA fund flows in Q1 show investors pulling R6.2bn out of ultra-short-term bond funds and pouring R10.5bn into flexible bond funds. The cash-is-king era is fading as investors move out the curve to lock in yields before any eventual rate cuts.
SARS Wants Proper Business Valuations. SARS is placing unprecedented pressure on defensible business valuations for CGT, donations tax, and estate duty. Relying on informal or outdated numbers is now a high-risk strategy. Professional valuations every one to three years are becoming best practice for SME-owning clients.
Prompt of the week
If you want to sort your recurring tasks quickly with AI...
Today’s topic gives you the framework the framework for sorting admin quickly, but this prompt helps you do the heavy lifting by generating a lit of common tasks for you to choose from, and then add your own, before categorising them for you.
How to use it:
Paste the prompt into any AI tool.
It will generate a list of common recurring tasks; tick or copy the ones you recognise.
Add any extras that are unique to your practice.
It sorts everything into delegate, automate, or drop with specific next steps.
Important: Do not include any client names or personal information. Describe tasks generically.
The Prompt:
You are a practice management consultant for independent financial advisors in South Africa. I need help identifying which of my recurring tasks I should delegate, automate, or drop entirely.
Start by generating a numbered list of 25 common recurring tasks that SA financial advisors and their teams typically perform for existing clients. Group them under these headings: Compliance & documentation (FICA, ROAs, FAIS), Client communication & scheduling, Portfolio administration & reporting, and Provider & platform admin.
Then ask me to reply with:
The number of these tasks I currently do
Any additional tasks I do that are not on the list
Once I reply, sort each selected task into one of three categories:
Delegate: must be done, but doesn't need the advisor. Suggest who should own it and what checklist or template they'd need.
Automate: repetitive and rule-based. Suggest a specific method (CRM trigger, email template, calendar rule, or platform feature).
Drop: no longer adds value or duplicates what a system already does. Explain why it's safe to stop.
Then, estimate the total hours per week I could recover and recommend the 3 changes to make first for the biggest immediate impact.
Keep the tone practical and direct. No fluff.
Did You Know? This week in 1939, the world’s first public broadcast of a sports game went out to the only 400 TV sets in the US at that time. As a matter of interest, Germany had broadcast parts of the 1936 Olympic Games (3 years before the US), but no one owned TV sets yet in those days, so no one saw it.
Till next time,
Seed Analytics Advisor Connect
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