First for the professional personal financial adviser
31 OCTOBER 2025 R69.95 INCL VAT
www.moneymarketing.co.za
WHAT’S INSIDE YOUR OCTOBER ISSUE: NEXT-GEN TOOLS FOR FINANCIAL ADVISERS By fully embracing technology, you can streamline processes and enhance compliance, allowing you to create personalised client experiences. From CRM to AI, we look at the latest trends in the market. Cover story + pg 10-15
WHY DFMS ARE ESSENTIAL Discretionary fund managers (DFMs) take the complexity of fund selection and portfolio management off advisers’ shoulders. By outsourcing investment decisions, you can be freed up to grow your practice. Pg16-17
KEEPING UP WITH UNIT TRUSTS Unit trusts remain a versatile building block for client portfolios, offering diversification, accessibility and professional management, making them suitable for both entry-level investors and high-networth clients. Pg 18-22
OPPORTUNITIES OFF THE BEATEN PATH Investors seeking uncorrelated returns and long-term growth opportunities should keep their focus on private equity. We take a closer look at the risks, liquidity constraints and potential rewards in the private equity space.
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Pg 24-25
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Future-proofing advice in an AI-driven era
B
ack in July 2001, Kobus Barnard, now Managing Director of Allegiance Consulting, wrote an article for MoneyMarketing that seemed more science fiction than reality. He spoke of a tool that could “calculate more than 7 million financial scenarios in less than a minute, predict your financial future, consider your ever-altering reality, be available 24/7, have the combined IQ of the world’s top experts, reach any client anywhere, and handle millions of clients at the same time – all without charging commission”. “At the time, it felt like a dream,” recalls Barnard. “But I knew that technology would eventually make this possible. What strikes me is that it only took 24 years for those predictions to become reality. Today, it’s no longer a fantasy, it’s our everyday environment.” Technology has not only caught up with financial services, it has enabled hyper-personalisation and scaling of traditional models of advice. From compliance and client onboarding to complex scenario planning, automation and artificial intelligence are redefining the role of the adviser. For Allegiance Consulting, founded in 1999 as a small team of legal advisers supporting independent financial intermediaries, the journey into technology wasn’t about chasing trends. It was about solving a very practical problem: availability. “We were booked three months in advance. The only way to scale complex advice was through standardisation, simplification and automation – in other words, technology,” says Barnard. That realisation sparked a transformation that took Allegiance from being 95% consulting-led in 2009 to 99% technology-led today. Along the way, they built a financial platform that helped advisers unlock billions in opportunities, and experimented with early AI engagement tools, laying the groundwork for the fintech-driven world we now inhabit. From fragmented agendas to aligned commitment In the early 2000s, when bank assurance was booming, Barnard noticed a fundamental gap. Despite housing short-term insurance, lending and investment products under one roof, banks struggled to align these services around a single client view. “It was like looking at a Venn diagram where the circles barely touched,” Barnard recalls. “There was no shared agenda between banker, adviser, auditor and client.” To test the concept, Allegiance Consulting ran experiments with groups of advisers. The insight? Timing and alignment matter more than opportunity alone. “If you create a roadmap where everyone – client, adviser, bank, auditor – agrees on priorities, you achieve what we
call aligned commitment,” says Barnard. By breaking big opportunities into phased plans over time, clients are more likely to say “yes” consistently, priming them for long-term decisions. Technology as the book of life This philosophy shaped the development of Allegiance’s CRM system in Avalon. More than a contact manager, it became a collaboration framework to record what Barnard calls the “book of work” – a rolling five-year roadmap of a client’s financial life. The platform allows advisers to map opportunities, align them with client goals and track progress through ongoing conversations. Beyond opportunity management, the CRM incorporates task management, document and forms libraries, integrated e-signatures, service ticketing and seamless collaboration with network partners. It has been fully refreshed in the past four years on a modern technology stack, ensuring both depth and usability. It is in the financial planning component where the platform truly excels beyond our wildest expectations. For planning, Avalon offers comprehensive modules: retirement saving, investment planning, risk analysis, estate planning, and business needs analysis. All of these components work cohesively to give advisers both breadth and depth of financial insight. It allows advisers to scale their own practice with hyper-personalisation. “The Avalon platform in its entirety is built around our Massive Transformative Purpose – empowering advisers to help clients discover, achieve and live remarkable lives,” explains Barnard. “We see it as the foundation of a Contextual Financial Identity™ for every client – a living, breathing model that integrates their data, goals, values and behaviours. That means advice is not just productdriven, but deeply personal, scalable, and always aligned with client outcomes.” Looking ahead Allegiance’s focus is now shifting to expand with a client engagement app, called Dreamzter™, which will become the tool for advisers to connect to their clients at scale. Dreamzter captures a client’s goals, passions, and dreams in an intuitive ‘wheel of life’, creating what Allegiance calls a contextual financial identity – a kind of digital financial twin of the client in the cloud. Continued on next page