Financial planning has always relied on patterns.
Young clients are expected to seek growth. Mid-career professionals should be building wealth. Older investors are assumed to become increasingly cautious and less digitally engaged.
Farzana Botha believes the pattern has broken. Or, as she put it, clients have executed a “behavioural U-turn”.
At the launch of the 2026 Sanlam Benchmark, the senior communications manager at Sanlam Risk and Savings argued that financial behaviour is no longer following familiar generational lines. Drawing on findings from the Sanlam Benchmark Consumer Survey and Sanlam Risk and Savings’ 2025 claims data, she said younger clients are behaving like traditionalists, retirees are emerging as digital adopters, and financial decisions are increasingly shaped by economic pressure, interrupted careers, health risks, and changing household dynamics rather than by age alone.
Understanding where clients are in life, she suggested, may now matter more than understanding when they were born.
Younger clients are looking for certainty, not just growth
Millennials and Generation Z – broadly those between the ages of 20 and 45 – are often portrayed as experience-driven risk takers, comfortable with uncertainty and focused on the present rather than the future.
Botha said the Benchmark challenges that stereotype.
“We consider them to be the YOLO [You Only Live Once] generation, all about the experiences… short-term experiences, volatile risk appetite, and unengaged,” she said. “But actually… 88% of the respondents in this group would prefer guaranteed income and security.”
She attributed that preference to a generation shaped by repeated economic shocks. Covid-19, market volatility, and uncertain career paths have made financial certainty more attractive than higher but more volatile investment returns.
The findings also suggest younger members want financial guidance earlier than many might expect. Respondents identified 35 as the ideal age for targeted financial intervention.
Their working lives, however, are rarely linear. Nearly half (46%) have experienced voluntary resignation, dismissal, or retrenchment, while 44% have already accessed their two-pot retirement savings. Half of those who withdrew took the maximum amount available, primarily to settle debt and cover everyday living expenses.
According to Botha, those career disruptions expose one of the retirement system’s biggest weaknesses.
“Only 40% had received no advice at termination, nothing other than a cold exit form,” she said. “If they’re getting no advice and they’re not knowing how to preserve that income at that point, it’s perpetuating a cycle of poverty as a result of this advice gap.”
Sanlam’s claims data also showed rising psychological illness within this age group, suggesting that financial pressure is increasingly taking a toll on members’ health.
Rather than chasing risk, Botha described Millennials and Generation Z as “traditionalists in disguise” – a generation seeking stability in an increasingly unpredictable world.
Gen X may be earning more, but they’re under growing pressure
Generation X, broadly those aged 46 to 61, is often seen as the financial engine room of the economy – enjoying peak earning years, established careers, and growing retirement savings.
“We assume that these are your high earners, your highflyers, bulletproof corporate athletes, peak career performance, maximum earning velocity,” Botha said.
The Benchmark found that only 28% of working South Africans in this cohort are debt-free. Many are supporting both children and ageing parents simultaneously, creating what Botha described as “sandwich pressures” that place increasing strain on household finances.
That pressure is reflected in how they manage their money. Three-quarters operate multiple bank accounts as a defensive budgeting strategy, ringfencing debit orders, emergency savings, and household expenses. More than seven in ten say rewards programmes influence where and how they spend.
Sanlam’s claims data shows the same vulnerability. During 2025, severe illness and injury claims totalled R549.9 million, with people aged 46 to 54 emerging as a particularly vulnerable group. Among women, 60% of severe illness claims occurred before the age of 55, many involving cancer and cardiovascular disease.
“We need to be able to treat this generation’s financial planning as an indivisible asset,” Botha said. “When you consider their retirement planning, their trauma planning, their income protection, all of it… we need to make that survival capital for them that gives them that mental resilience to know that they are covered in all instances.”
Retirement planning, healthcare, and income protection should no longer be viewed as separate financial products. Together, they form the resilience households rely on when illness or other life shocks interrupt earning capacity.
For Generation X, peak earning years no longer guarantee financial resilience.
Older clients are more digitally engaged than many assume
People entering retirement have traditionally been viewed as gradually withdrawing from the digital world and slowing down financially.
According to Botha, that is “the furthest thing from the truth”.
Instead, she described many retirees as “digital hustlers”. More than 90% use digital platforms, 94% use WhatsApp as their primary communication channel, and 91% actively use digital banking services.
“We thought the gig economy was for the Gen Zs,” she said. “But in actual fact it’s these people who have taken it over. They are the digital hustlers.”
Many are supplementing their retirement income through part-time work, property rentals, and other income-generating activities. Botha said this is driven less by convenience than by financial pressure.
That pressure is evident in retirement outcomes. Lump-sum retirement benefits now last an average of just 14.6 months, compared with about 30 months a decade ago. Within four to five years of retirement, about one-third of pensioners experience severe financial strain, forcing many to cut grocery spending, postpone home maintenance, and even downgrade or cancel medical scheme cover.
At the same time, retirees are looking for more engagement, not less.
“They really want social engagement,” Botha said. “They’re very keen on being able to watch these digital webinars and get financial education.”
She described them as “a highly engaged cohort that requires us to shift the way we engage with them”.
Retirement, it seems, no longer marks a retreat from the digital world. They are managing their finances online while actively seeking education, advice, and opportunities to connect with others.
The biggest gap is not access to advice – it’s timing
Despite their different financial pressures, the three generations share one common problem: advice often arrives when there is little time left to change the outcome.
She described this as one of the industry’s biggest “advice black holes”.
According to the Benchmark, 43% of people have never met with a financial adviser. Among those who do receive advice, meaningful engagement occurs, on average, only one year and eight months before retirement.
“Imagine getting your first intervention one and a half years before retirement,” Botha said. “That is not a runway into retirement, that is an exit point, so there’s no more room for you to be able to navigate and manoeuvre to a better outcome.”
The report also found that fewer than half of members understand trustee-endorsed retirement options, while only one in four remembers discussing them with an adviser.
Beyond technical expertise
Technical expertise remains essential, Botha argued, but it is no longer enough.
She described the future financial professional as “M-shaped” – someone who combines financial expertise with behavioural insight, connected by “curiosity and shared purpose”.
Drawing on the example of tennis great Rafael Nadal, she argued that “range beats specialisation, if your range is held together by a common thread”. Professionals who understand behavioural finance, health risks, and changing family dynamics alongside investment planning are better equipped to solve the increasingly complex problems their clients face.
Artificial intelligence, she said, should become an “empathy co-pilot”, analysing data, identifying patterns, and prompting earlier interventions while leaving professionals free to exercise the judgement, strategic thinking, and empathy that technology cannot replicate.
“Our clients are not reasoning through their financial planning through logic and mathematical reasoning,” she said. Instead, they are navigating uncertainty “through deep emotional resonance”.
Throughout her presentation, Botha challenged the idea that age remains the best predictor of financial behaviour. Economic uncertainty, interrupted careers, debt, ill health, and changing family responsibilities increasingly shape the decisions people make throughout their lives.
“We need to throw our assumptions away and adjust how we show up for this client,” she said.
