For decades, financial services have organised people’s lives into separate conversations. Retirement savings. Medical schemes. Life insurance. Disability cover. Employee wellness.
Clients do not experience life that way.
Illness affects income. Income affects retirement savings. Financial stress affects health. Healthcare costs compete with debt repayments, school fees, and long-term saving. Every decision draws on the same household budget.
That theme surfaced repeatedly throughout this year’s Sanlam Benchmark Survey. Across the research and panel discussions, the same question emerged: after decades of reshaping South Africa’s retirement system, is the next challenge helping members navigate the benefits they already have?
Earlier this year, Sanlam outlined a strategy to bring healthcare, insurance, and retirement planning into a more integrated advice framework.
Read: Sanlam links health and wealth in advice model shift
At the time, it appeared to be a shift in product strategy. The Benchmark research places it within a much broader conversation.
Decades of building a stronger system
South Africa’s retirement industry has spent the past two decades becoming more integrated behind the scenes.
Presenting the Benchmark’s review of structural change, Anna Siwiak, head of product development at Sanlam Umbrella Solutions, traced the industry’s evolution since 2006.
Thousands of retirement funds have consolidated into larger umbrella funds. Governance has strengthened. Preservation has become embedded through the two-pot retirement system. Administration has become more sophisticated, while greater scale and technology have helped to contain costs despite increasing regulatory demands.
Read: The quiet revolution in retirement fund costs
Looking back at previous Benchmark surveys, Siwiak noted how accurately the industry anticipated many of today’s reforms. Participants expected greater trustee accountability, stronger preservation measures, and closer alignment between pension and provident funds. Two decades later, those changes have largely materialised.
The Benchmark argues that this period of structural reform has laid the foundation for a different phase. The emphasis now shifts from implementing reform to improving member outcomes through innovation, integration, and behavioural insight.
Members don’t organise their finances by product
Healthcare, debt, children’s education, housing costs, retirement contributions, and insurance premiums all compete for the same monthly income. Decisions in one area inevitably affect another.
Across its chapters on retirement confidence, gambling, financial advice, and preservation, the Benchmark report reaches the same conclusion: members generally understand the importance of long-term financial planning, but immediate financial pressures often dictate their decisions.
The report also argues that financial support remains fragmented.
Retirement benefit counselling explains retirement options. Financial advisers provide personalised recommendations. Digital tools sit alongside both. Members often encounter each separately rather than as part of a co-ordinated system.
The same pattern extends beyond retirement.
Healthcare decisions influence financial resilience. Poor health can interrupt employment and reduce retirement savings. Financial stress can affect physical and mental well-being.
Members experience those connections every day, even if financial products do not.
Employers are ready for a more integrated approach
This year’s Benchmark also asked employers about integrated benefit offerings.
The response was largely positive. Among umbrella fund participants, 65% rated a single offering combining health, group risk, and retirement benefits as attractive or very attractive. Support among standalone funds was lower but still significant at 46%.
When respondents were asked what they would most like to integrate, the preferred option was not a combination of two benefit categories. Most chose a fully integrated model combining health, group risk, and retirement benefits. Among umbrella funds, 59% preferred full integration. Half of standalone funds reached the same conclusion.
Siwiak said the consumer research pointed in the same direction.
Asked whether they would prefer a one-stop shop for their financial needs, 22% answered “definitely yes”, while another 34% said the idea “probably sounds good”. She described the findings as evidence that employers and members are increasingly looking for a more holistic approach to financial well-being.
The research does not suggest that consumers want fewer financial products. It suggests they want advice that connects them.
The problem isn’t missing benefits. It’s fragmentation.
The discussion became more practical during the panel session that followed the Benchmark presentation.
San-Marie Crause, the managing executive: Sanlam Group Risk, argued that South Africa’s employee benefits industry does not lack products. Medical schemes, employee assistance programmes, wellness initiatives, severe illness cover, disability benefits, and life insurance are already widely available.
“The fragmentation itself and the way the benefits don’t work together nicely,” she said, “actually do hold members back.”
Employers invest across all these areas, yet each benefit tends to operate independently. Medical schemes focus on treatment. Risk benefits respond when illness or disability affects income. Retirement funds accumulate long-term savings. Wellness programmes encourage healthier behaviour.
Someone diagnosed with diabetes, for example, may face higher medical costs, time away from work, reduced income, greater insurance risk, and lower retirement savings over time. The financial consequences extend well beyond healthcare.
Earlier intervention
Adriana Lecu, the head of global protection at Allianz SE, described how insurers in several markets are responding to rising mental health claims by intervening earlier.
Income protection increasingly includes prevention, rehabilitation, and return-to-work support instead of focusing only on paying claims once someone becomes unable to work.
Starting earlier, she said, has improved claims outcomes while helping employees to recover before conditions deteriorate.
The same principle appears throughout the Benchmark.
Members say financial education should begin long before retirement, yet retirement benefit counselling remains concentrated at retirement itself. The report describes a system that often activates only once members reach a major decision point.
People first, products second
The discussion also challenged another assumption: that better engagement depends mainly on providing more information.
Drawing on his experience leading digital transformation in healthcare rather than insurance, Dr Chris Mathew, managing director: cancer care and business development at Netcare, argued that organisations often begin with a solution before fully understanding the problem.
The first question people ask is simple: “What’s in it for me?”
The second follows quickly: “What’s in it for you?”
Members want to know not only how a programme benefits them, but why an organisation wants them to change their behaviour. In an increasingly digital environment, trust has become as important as the benefit itself.
Mathew argued that many organisations believe they are solving problems when they are really trying to fit existing products or technology to people whose needs they have not fully understood.
“We often spend a lot of time thinking that we’re problem solving,” he said, “but we’re actually solution solving.”
Later, Mathew argued that integration works best when employers, employees, and providers measure success in the same way. Healthier employees mean better outcomes for individuals and improved productivity and lower long-term costs for employers.
The Benchmark report reaches a similar conclusion about financial advice. Advisers often influence retirement outcomes because they build trusted relationships over many years rather than appearing only when retirement decisions must be made.
Integration should simplify, not complicate
Satish Antony, chief analytics and strategy officer at Medscheme, offered perhaps the panel’s simplest test for integration.
- Does it make the system easier?
- Does it make the member journey easier?
- Does it improve measurable outcomes?
If not, integration becomes little more than existing products grouped under a single label.
“If the answer to that is yes,” he said, “then integration is good and supportive.”
“Otherwise… you’re looking at greater frustration.”
The report does not argue for replacing retirement benefit counselling with financial advice, or financial advice with technology. It proposes connecting them.
Technology provides continuous engagement. Retirement benefit counselling explains fund decisions. Financial advisers personalise those decisions.
Each serves a different purpose. Together, they form a member support system that extends across a working lifetime rather than appearing only at isolated events.
Crause suggested the same thinking should eventually extend beyond retirement planning.
Looking ahead, she envisaged member touchpoints that bring together retirement advice, health benefits, and risk benefits instead of treating each as separate conversations. Risk, she observed, still receives far less attention than retirement or medical scheme benefits.
The next phase
Earlier this year, Sanlam presented integration as part of its long-term “wealth and health” strategy. The Benchmark report places that strategy within a broader industry context.
Over the past two decades, funds consolidated. Governance improved. Costs fell. Technology advanced.
The next phase focuses less on institutions than on members. It centres on helping people connect decisions about health, debt, insurance, retirement savings, and financial advice.
As Siwiak concluded, structural reform has provided the foundation. The next step is using innovation, integration, and behavioural insight to improve member outcomes.
