Did you hear? The two biggest AI labs shipped finance products four days apart: OpenAI's ChatGPT for Financial Services on 10 September and Anthropic's Claude for Financial Advisors on 14 September. Of course, these are international tools that won’t natively serve SA and our laws specifically, but we will take a closer look and report back to you on them soon.
This week in Seed Analytics Advisor Connect:
Upcoming events: Chances to network & earn CPD points.
Scattered across systems: 4 parts of your business to pull together.
One current picture: Your whole book, without the export stitching.
New opportunities & advisory jobs for you to explore in SA.
R34m in FIC Act fines & the rand slides with emerging peers.
Prompt of the week: See how scattered your own information is.
Take Note
FPI Professionals Convention – Cape Town, 7–8 Oct: The FPI's flagship annual event returns to the Century City Conference Centre, with the FPI Awards Ceremony and Gala Dinner on the evening of the 7th. Worth 11,5 verifiable CPD hours (3 ethics, 6,5 general, 2 technical). Details here.
FPSB Psychology in Practice – Online, anytime: An on-demand FPI course pairing a video series with an e-book on the behavioural side of advice. Paid, self-paced, and worth 4 CPD points on completion. Details here.
Four business essentials worth having on hand
If the key information describing your own operation is scattered, it’s worth reigning it in…
Most teams can describe what they do, but far fewer can physically show it on demand. That’s because the information sits across a CRM, a few platform logins, an inbox and somebody's spreadsheet. Manageable day to day, but expensive and complex the moment anyone outside needs to see it.
Our own regulator has already given us a preview of what will eventually be required. The Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA)'s draft Omni-Risk Return includes twelve sections covering an institution's operations, governance and risk. Although still just a draft, for now, it is a good guideline for the essential numbers and insights on your business to always have on hand.
Here are the four business essentials that tend to be scattered furthest…
1. What your clients hold across every platform
Each platform will happily tell you its own piece, but assembling those pieces from multiple platforms into one picture is tough: it might take a day of exports and building a spreadsheet, which is exactly why that picture gets rebuilt roughly once a year and is out of date as soon as the following month.
Take action: Put together one list of what every client holds and where, across all your platforms, then agree who updates the list and how often.
2. Your client list sorted by product and type
Client information tends to be split between a CRM and several spreadsheets, so counting clients is easy but categorising what they have is not. A sorted and categorised client list answers the following question straight away: how many clients hold each product and how they are grouped across different categories.
Take action: consolidate your client list in one place, sort it by product and client type, and remove any duplicates.
3. Where client data is stored (and who can access it)
This is rarely formally documented. Most teams know it informally, which works perfectly well until somebody leaves, a laptop goes missing, or a client requests visibility of how their data is stored and protected. It is also the foundation of your POPIA obligations, because you cannot protect or account for information that is disparate and difficult to locate.
Take action: Formally document where client data is stored and who can access the data. This must include data that is kept on or accessed via staff phones and personal accounts.
4. Your complaints, their causes, and outcomes
Complaints are often handled well and recorded informally, which only becomes a problem when you need to identify patterns rather than individual incidents. A year of complaints, sorted by cause and outcome, will provide information about your own advice process that would otherwise be impossible to see.
Take action: Start a consolidated complaint document that includes the complaint, what it was about and how it was resolved (the outcome). Go back as far as your records reasonably allow.
Join the conversation…
How many of those four data sets already sit in one place?
One consolidated and up-to-date picture of the whole book
A consolidated view of what your clients hold generally does not exist until somebody takes the time to build it. Each platform reports its own piece, in its own format and on its own schedule, so the combined picture is pieced together manually using exports from multiple platforms, and it is usually out of date by the time it is finished.
Seed's Consolidated Statements delivers your clients' investment data automatically from over 65 investment platforms, as one consistent monthly feed into your own systems. You get an up-to-date and consolidated view of the book, along with a clear record of where every number came from.
Already on Seed?
Use your Seed feed to build a list of every client, every holding, every platform, in one place and current.
New to Seed?
Featured Section
New wealth and fin advisory career opportunities in SA
Financial Advisor (Western Cape) @ Dis-Chem Life
Financial Planner (Umhlanga) @ Lonfin Wealth BlueStar
Financial Planning Professional (JHB) @ Integrity Wealth Management
Broker Consultant (JHB) @ Rand Merchant Bank
Broker Consultant (Kimberley) @ Sanlam
Financial Advisor (Sandton) @ IWCP
In Case You Missed It…
Industry Roundup
Capitec and Ninety One Fined R34m. Following 2023 inspections under the FIC Act, the regulator found both had fallen short on customer due diligence and compliance controls, issuing Capitec five cautions and a R28 million penalty and Ninety One Assurance two cautions, two reprimands and R6 million.
Advisers Told to Drop 70% of Their Work. Technology entrepreneur Stafford Masie told Old Mutual Wealth's Investival that AI should strip routine processing out of an adviser's day so the time goes to understanding clients instead, warning that firms which use it mainly to cut headcount are choosing dystopia over reinvention.
Trust Services Face a Tougher Test. Fiduciary specialists at the Fiduciary Institute of Southern Africa's annual conference questioned whether trust fees still reflect the responsibility involved, with PH Fiduciary's Johnny Davis warning that if you're not pricing for risk, you're subsidising it as the proposed Regulation of Trusts bill adds penalties and offences.
Emerging Currencies Extend Their Slide. Emerging-market currencies fell for a fourth straight day on Tuesday as rising global bond yields spread tension across riskier assets, with commodity-exposed currencies including the rand underperforming since the dollar began rebounding last week.
Prompt of the week
If you want to see how scattered your own information is…
This prompt turns the four into a short self-check, and tells you where each one normally hides. You supply the detail about your own setup; the AI only ever builds the frame.
How to use it:
Paste the prompt into your AI tool of choice.
Answer its questions in general terms only (the systems you use, roughly how many clients and advisors), with no client names or figures.
Work through the self-check with whoever does your reporting.
Important: Do not upload any client data, names, balances or account information into an AI tool. This prompt builds a self-check only; you fill it in yourself, offline.
The Prompt:
You are helping the owner of a South African financial advisory business work out how scattered its own information has become. Do not ask for, and I will not give, any real client, revenue or personal data. Work only from the general descriptions I provide.
First, ask me three short questions, one at a time: (1) the systems where our client and investment information currently sits; (2) roughly how many clients and advisors we have; (3) who does our reporting. Wait for my answers.
Then produce, in South African English, a short self-check built on these four parts of the business: what clients hold across platforms; the client list by product and type; where client data is stored and who can open it; and complaints with their causes and outcomes.
For each one, give me: a plain sentence describing what good looks like, the places the information usually sits in a business like mine, one likely reason it takes too long today, and a first step to fix it. Finish with the one I should tackle first, and why.
Keep it practical, use no jargon, and tell me to confirm anything touching POPIA or record-keeping obligations with my compliance officer rather than relying on your wording.
Did you know? This week, 12 years apart, Steve Jobs both left and returned to Apple. In 1985, he resigned after losing a boardroom fight, going on to found NeXT and buy a small computer graphics division from George Lucas that would become Pixar. On the same day, in 1997, he was named Apple's interim CEO again.
Till next time,
Seed Analytics Advisor Connect
Did someone forward you this newsletter? Subscribe to it here.