By Derek Notman, CFP®, Founder & CEO, Couplr. Based on research and presentations delivered at the Financial Planning Institute of Southern Africa (FPI) Approved Professional Practice Forum, 2025. Updated August 10, 2026.
The story most people assume about wealth-management demand in South Africa — that the client of the future is an older, higher-net-worth investor looking for an in-person, phone-first relationship with an established firm — turns out to be substantially wrong. Research presented at the FPI Approved Professional Practice Forum in 2025, drawing on real behavioral data from consumers actively searching for a financial adviser in South Africa, found that ~82% of people searching for help were under age 50, ~60% wanted an adviser under the age of 45, and over 50% wanted to work with an adviser virtually. When adviser gender was named as a preference, a female adviser was preferred more often. Top requested services were financial planning, retirement planning, and managing investments — delivered in English, Zulu, and Afrikaans. That data is a wake-up call for any firm still building its distribution model around the older, phone-first, in-person client — and it is a preview of what the client of the future looks like almost everywhere.
What the data actually shows
The consumer profile that showed up in the Couplr matching research in South Africa breaks with several of the industry’s inherited assumptions:
- Age of consumers searching for help: ~82% were under 50. This is not the tail end of the boomer wealth transfer — it is the front end of the next generation of clients.
- Age of adviser they wanted to work with: ~60% wanted an adviser under 45. Consumers are self-sorting toward advisers who will be around for the next 20 to 30 years of their financial life.
- Channel preference: Over 50% wanted to work with an adviser virtually. This is not a pandemic hangover. This is a durable expectation about what a modern professional relationship looks like.
- Gender preference (when it was expressed): Female advisers were preferred more often than male advisers. Firms whose adviser force does not reflect this preference are structurally under-serving the market.
- Language preferences: English, Zulu, and Afrikaans led the requested list — a reminder that “hyper-personalization” in South Africa includes language, not just service offering.
- Top services requested: Financial planning, retirement planning, managing investments. Comprehensive advice, not product-first transactions.
Why these consumers are hard to reach with the incumbent model
The traditional South African wealth distribution model is built around a network of established, in-person, phone-first advisers, most of whom are older and male, most of whom operate through the large captive networks (Liberty, Sanlam, Alexforbes, Discovery, and similar). That model was optimized for the client of 1990-2010. It is a poor match for the consumer the research surfaced.
What that consumer wants:
- A digital-first, mobile-native discovery experience — not a broker locator built for a desktop browser.
- An adviser they can meet on video from anywhere.
- An adviser who reflects who they are, not who the firm has historically hired.
- A conversation that starts with values and life, not with a product illustration.
Ubuntu is not a marketing angle. It is the frame.
One thing that came through in the FPI research — and in every conversation with South African advisers and clients — is that the philosophy of Ubuntu (“I am because we are”) is not a slogan to add to a website. It is the underlying frame consumers are actually operating in.
Ubuntu changes how personalization and trust get built. Trust in a Ubuntu frame is not just about the individual adviser’s competence — it is about the adviser’s relationship to the community the client belongs to. A digital-first, hyper-personalized discovery experience that ignores this dimension will feel cold to a South African consumer even if it works perfectly on every technical metric. The firms and advisers who build for Ubuntu — who invest in genuine community connection alongside the technology — are the ones who convert.
What this means for South African wealth and insurance firms
Three implications for enterprise firms operating in South Africa:
- Rebuild the “find an adviser” experience for the actual consumer. The typical broker locator on a captive network’s website is a directory of near-strangers filtered by geography and product line. That produces choice overload for the exact consumer profile the research surfaced. A behaviorally matched shortlist of two or three advisers, tuned to the consumer’s values and communication preferences, converts materially better.
- Invest in adviser diversity that reflects the demand. The gender, age, and cultural composition of the adviser force needs to move toward what consumers are actually asking for. This is not a diversity-for-its-own-sake argument. It is a demand-matching argument.
- Meet Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) with engagement, not disclosure. The FSCA’s TCF framework is often treated as a compliance obligation. In a Ubuntu frame, it is a marketing opportunity — the firms that treat customers demonstrably fairly through the entire journey are the ones consumers actually trust.
Why this is a preview of everywhere, not just South Africa
The demographic pattern the FPI research surfaced — younger, more diverse, more digital, expecting personalization and reflected identity — is not a South African anomaly. It is what the U.S. wealth market looks like in 2030 and beyond. J.D. Power’s U.S. research shows exactly the same generational shift: younger investors prefer digital, prefer video, expect personalization, and are willing to switch firms for lower fees or better fit.
The firms that build for the South African consumer of 2025 are practicing on a compressed timeline for the U.S. consumer of 2030. That practice is going to be worth a lot.
How Couplr fits
Couplr Match is the layer that sits on top of an existing enterprise partner’s “find an adviser” experience — wealth firm, insurance carrier, or bank — and turns the flat directory into a behaviorally matched shortlist. In the South African context, that means the consumer who arrives on Liberty’s or Sanlam’s or Discovery’s “find an adviser” page gets the two or three advisers they are actually most likely to connect with — matched on values, life-stage, communication preferences, life-event context, and (where possible) language and cultural fit — instead of a filtered list of the nearest ten advisers.
The infrastructure is the same as what powers Couplr Match in the U.S. The tuning is South African: adviser attributes that matter to Ubuntu-frame consumers, language preferences, cultural context, and a discovery experience designed for mobile-first, virtual-first clients under 50.
One thing has changed since this research was presented. In April 2026 the Johannesburg High Court held that a percentage-of-premium lead referral agreement was an unlicensed intermediary service under the FAIS Act, and refused to enforce it. Referral arrangements across South African distribution are now under review, which sharpens the argument made here: how a firm acquires a consumer is a structural question, not a marketing one. Read Derek Notman on why that ruling may be good news for South African advisers and consumers.
The Bottom Line
The South African consumer searching for a financial adviser in 2025 is younger, more digital, more diverse, and more values-oriented than the incumbent distribution model was built to serve. The firms that adapt — by rebuilding the discovery experience around behavioral matching, investing in adviser diversity, and taking Ubuntu seriously as a frame rather than a slogan — will own the next generation of relationships. The firms that don’t will watch this consumer default to a competitor, or to no adviser at all.