How financial advice is moving beyond products to focus on client purpose and well-being was the topic of a panel discussion on the first day of the Financial Planning Institute of Southern Africa’s annual convention on Monday.
The discussion examined how advisory models are adapting to changing client expectations, greater personalisation, and a renewed focus on trust and relationships.
The moderator of the discussion, Derek Notman, the chief executive of fintech Coulpr AI, reflected on his experience as an adviser, describing how the traditional model of selling products has shifted towards a more meaningful approach.
“I started as a financial adviser selling life insurance,” he said. “I was taught product. I was taught to find clients and sell said product to help them achieve their hopes, dreams, and goals.”
Over time, he observed a change in both his practice and client expectations. “I kept selling product, but it started going into investments, annuities, financial plans, all still products, but it was shifting. And ultimately what I started to realise is that clients didn’t want the products – they wanted the purpose, the solution, the meaning behind the money.”
Notman said the profession had long operated on a product-led model but was now undergoing “an evolution of advice”, from transactions to relationships and from managing money to enhancing client well-being. Referring to a study released by the World Economic Forum, The Future of Financial Advice, he said clients are looking for “a highly personalised, digitally enhanced, holistic experience with a human adviser who is talking to them about the meaning behind their money”.
Henry van Deventer, the head of omnichannel advice at Liberty, said the starting point must always be the client’s purpose.
“For relationships to work, you have to want the same stuff,” he said. In financial planning, the “why” is important, but “it’s not your why, it’s your client’s why that is the single most important thing we need to build everything around”.
Van Deventer said studies have shown that the most important factor for clients is personalisation – helping them to achieve what matters most to them in a reliable and reasonable way. “If you fail to build that, not only do you fail to deliver what clients want, it’s also a pretty bad business decision,” he said. The starting point is understanding what is most important to clients and ensuring both the advice process and the supporting products align with that goal.
Jacques Coetzer, the general manager of strategy and transformation at Sanlam, said the industry also needs to acknowledge that many clients are uncertain or misinformed about their financial needs. “Many people don’t know what they don’t know,” he said. “And even more than that, many people think they know. With all the sources of information – whether you can trust it or not – they end up sitting with lists of information, not knowing what to do with it.”
Effective advice begins with understanding what is important to the client and simplifying the process. “For us, the planning process isn’t need-product. It’s need-bucket-product,” he said.
“If you talk about, ‘What do you need to retire – the bucket? Have you got enough to make that happen? And if not, what do you need to add?’ – that changes the conversation, and how does that work with the pieces that makes up or fill the bucket?”
Dawie de Villiers, the group chief executive of Alexforbes, said the growing diversity of clients requires a broader range of advisory approaches and adviser types. “Clients are becoming so diverse and so different,” he said. “Therefore, it works to have an array of types of advice, an array of types of advisers.”
He said Alexforbes is thinking deeply about how to diversify the people who give advice. “Some [clients] just want help. Others want a product or a solution. And others just want a minimum outcome,” he said.
Understanding what the client truly wants, De Villiers said, is essential. “Am I going to go there and do a whole financial planning [exercise] and the only thing he wants to do is save for his daughter’s wedding? So, I think it’s a question of really understanding the client and then going out to find whatever is in the market.”
Building trust and transparency
Notman noted that mistrust can be a major barrier for the profession and asked how firms are working to make their adviser networks more transparent and trustworthy.
Coetzer said recruitment and the first client interaction are critical. “We try to recruit trustworthy people, because I don’t think that’s something you can teach somebody to be,” he said.
“A lot of the relationship quality begins with what happens in the first meeting. If you’re in that first meeting with a client and you spend 50 minutes of the time talking, and the client talks 10 minutes, the outcome is predictable. The client’s going to walk away being overwhelmed, they don’t know what’s going on, and the relationship is off to a shaky start. Flip it the other way around, and suddenly the conversation becomes something completely different.”
De Villiers agreed and said Alexforbes is paying close attention to how clients and advisers are matched. “The first interaction is important, but you must have a little bit of an understanding of the client even before the meeting, just to see which type of adviser goes there,” he said. “If there’s not a match on day one, then we change that adviser, because it is important to give the client what they want. If that doesn’t exist, there won’t be the long-term trust.”
He added that trust now extends beyond individual clients to families. “It’s the whole family that has to trust the adviser,” he said. “If you and the dad have a relationship and the next day they sit around the table and they say, ‘What are you doing with our money?’ – as the whole family – the adviser needs to also have that trust with them.”
De Villiers said trust is earned over long relationships and measured by impact, while Coetzer described it in experiential terms: trust grows when outcomes meet or exceed expectations repeatedly.
Van Deventer highlighted the importance of the adviser’s operational reliability (the ability to communicate and follow through). Technology, if used correctly, can improve reliability and communication and thus support trust.
AI: where it helps, where it hurts
Delving deeper into the role of technology, the panel addressed the opportunities and risks of integrating artificial intelligence into business practices.
Van Deventer described three primary areas where AI is already useful:
- Front-office communications: AI can help advisers to communicate with clients more clearly, more understandably, more regularly for the same or a lesser amount of work, which matters because communication failure is a leading cause of client attrition.
- Paraplanning/first-draft planning: AI-driven financial planning tools can provide a first draft financial plan for review, accelerating routine drafting and reducing administration.
- Partner and product development: Product suppliers and asset managers can create offerings better suited to clients’ needs.
Coetzer added scalability and better use of client time as additional AI gains: AI can scale client engagement and combined with data analytics, make client meetings more effective – provided advisers choose which problems to solve rather than try to solve everything at once.
The panel discussed the hazards that can arise from over-trusting or mis-implementing AI.
Van Deventer described a product that records a meeting, generates minutes, and auto populates “a record of advice” – and warned that such outputs can present “a record of advice based on opinion as understood by a computer, which is kind of like a terrifying thing”. He asked where the human analysis, the financial needs analysis (FNA), and the basis for advice fit into an automated output.
De Villers warned that AI-produced errors that destroy years of trust. “AI could make that mistake for you, or you could make that mistake by using AI wrong.”
The panel also warned that AI cannot substitute for tailoring to a client’s risk profile, investment horizon, and unique circumstances. Automation should focus on administration and repeatable tasks, not on replacing bespoke judgement.
It was noted that clients can arrive for a consultation with AI-generated information that is structured but overwhelming, and sometimes a client “knows just enough to be dangerous”, which increases the adviser’s filtering burden.
The panel suggested two ways in which advisers can manage AI risk:
- AI outputs should be first drafts or aids, not final client deliverables without adviser review; advisers must preserve the six-step planning process and ensure that the FNA remains central.
- Advisers should find reliable partners and apply due diligence before deploying tools to clients, because vendor errors can directly harm trust.
Social media and finfluencers
The panel addressed social media both as a source of risk and as a prompt for advisers to change how they engage prospective and existing clients.
Notman said many young people get finance tips from TikTok creators who are not licensed; should advisers see them as competitors or partners?
The panel’s view was that influencer content is often opinion or noise rather than fact, and the volume of persuasive, unvetted content increases the risk of poor client choices and scams.
However, Coetzer observed that more people are becoming aware that social content is opinion, not fact. There’s a greater likelihood that people will check influencer information somewhere else – hopefully, with somebody an adviser.
At the same time, Coetzer said finfluencers should be subject to some level of regulation. “You can’t have people talking to the masses around, effectively, life-changing decisions around finances, not knowing what they’re talking about. I don’t know what that regulation looks like. I don’t even know how you do it.”
The panel agreed that advisers must respond by educating clients and adapting how they present advice. Van Deventer said clients influenced by social media will keep doing the wrong thing until they know better, so advisers bear responsibility for teaching clients how to evaluate online claims.
De Villiers said advisers stand to lose clients to finfluencers if they fail to adapt how they communicate. “If I talk to a 20-year-old in the same way I did 30 years ago: ‘You shall buy this because this is the right thing to do.’ […] We’re pushing them to the influencers […] we’re pushing them to do their own thing and to read online what to do.”
