South Africa — n = 31
Finding an advisor in South Africa
What the 31 pages we walked in South Africa look like on the six, and how each business model here compares with itself in the other countries. The firm-by-firm findings live on the business-model pages.
What South Africa looks like on the six
Mean 1.45 of six across 31 pages.
Can you see a real person at all?
35%
11 of 31
11 of 31 show a named advisor somewhere on the page without asking for a form first. On the other 20, a visitor never sees an individual at all.
Can you narrow by what you need?
23%
7 of 31
7 of 31 offer a control for specialty, credentials, or how an advisor is paid. On the other 24, location is the only thing a visitor can narrow by, or there is nothing to narrow by at all.
Can you narrow by who fits you?
10%
3 of 31
3 of 31 offer a control for the language a visitor speaks, the community they belong to, or the life event they are facing. On the other 28, who the visitor is makes no difference to who they are shown.
Can you reach them yourself?
32%
10 of 31
10 of 31 give a visitor that named advisor’s own phone, email, or calendar without submitting their details to the firm first. The other 21 do not.
Can you keep your details until you choose?
32%
10 of 31
10 of 31 let a visitor reach the advisor they picked without joining a queue, asking for a callback, or filling in a match form. On the other 21, the route runs through the firm.
Can a machine find them?
13%
4 of 31
4 of 31 put their advisors in the served bytes, where a crawler or an answer engine can read them. On the other 27, the advisors are invisible to machines.
The lowest mean in the study at 1.45 of six, and the gap is not subtle. South African surfaces are built around the enquiry rather than the person: product and service-line selectors that route a consumer to a callback, with no named individual at the end of them.
Not one of the 31 passes all six. 20 pass none.
On 20 of them no named advisor appears at any depth. A visitor who arrives wanting to choose a person never gets to the point of choosing.
2 hand a visitor a named advisor they were given no way to choose — the connection works and the matching never happened. That is the study’s central finding, and it holds here.
4 advertise a way to narrow by language. Whether each one works is a separate question, and this study answers it separately: several ship a language control the page never transmits.
Business model separates these surfaces more than anything else does. Rias and independent wealth managers here average 3 of six across 7 surfaces; banks and credit unions average 0 across 5. Both are in the same market, under the same regulator, serving the same consumer.
By business model
The same business model, read against itself in each country
A bank is not a wirehouse and a wirehouse is not a lead marketplace, so a country mean on its own hides more than it shows. Every row here opens the full firm-by-firm finding for that business model.
| Business model | Surfaces | Mean of six | Median | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RIAs & independent wealth managerssee all 7 | 7 | 3 | 4 | US 3.82 |
| Insurance carrierssee all 13 | 13 | 0.69 | 0 | CA 2.7US 2.52 |
| Banks & credit unionssee all 5 | 5 | 0 | 0 | CA 4.5US 3.1 |
Every one of the 31 South Africa pages is listed in full, with its controls, its transcript and the URL we audited, on its business-model page. Each appears exactly once in this report.
Looking for one firm?
This page is the country read. To find a named firm, search it on the index — every South Africa page is in there — or open the business model it belongs to in the table above.
Every part of this report
By business model