After nearly a decade in financial services, you develop certain assumptions about what you know. This is based on experience, through research, developing solutions that work, serving clients who are in different stages of life, and applying what you have learned throughout the years. This is not arrogance, exactly – more a quiet confidence that naturally arrives after enough years in the same industry. As a result, you somewhat stop expecting to be surprised.
I presented at Meet the Managers in Johannesburg on the 9th of June on the topic of “Findotec is not about guessing the next winner – it’s about never being stuck with yesterday’s loser” and attended as a delegate in Cape Town on the 10th. Two cities, two very different rooms, and more to think about on the flight home than I’d anticipated.
The conversation that stayed with me longest didn’t happen during a formal session, but away from the noise. Someone challenged me on how you benchmark Findotec, a virtual fund of funds (self-coined), when there is no directly comparable peer group in the South African market. It’s a fair question, and I’ll be honest, I didn’t have a clean, packaged answer for it. What I did have was a position: benchmarking against a narrow peer group can obscure underperformance rather than reveal it if the peer group itself is performing poorly. The conversation that followed made me think harder about how we communicate externally – not just to advisers who already understand mechanics, but to anyone trying to evaluate us fairly.
That exchange clarified something I’d known but perhaps not stated clearly enough: virtual fund of funds is still a genuinely new concept in this market. There is no direct equivalent. Which means we carry the responsibility of explaining it precisely – the problem it solves before the solution it offers – to audiences who may be encountering it for the first time. The benchmarking question reminded me that being first in a category is only an advantage if you’re willing to do the work of defining it.
Unsurprisingly, the AI conversation surfaced across at least three separate sessions, and the range of opinion was wider than I expected. There were managers confident that AI will transform how funds are run, others who are sceptical of the cost relative to the output, and a fair few who had not yet formed a clear view either way. What struck me was a point raised in one of the sessions – that while AI can be used effectively for prediction and analysis, a human still has to sign off on the output.
This may not be a groundbreaking insight, but I support the sentiment. It connects to something I’ve been thinking about for a while: AI is trained on historical data. This means that, by definition, it looks backward. In an industry where conditions can shift in ways that have no historical precedent, that matters. Performance can tell you what has already happened, while behaviour tells you what could happen next. AI does not yet have the capability to interpret, let alone predict, such patterns.
The third observation is harder to frame, but worth addressing. The room at Johannesburg skewed older – I’d estimate the average age at around 60, with the demographic being predominantly male and white. There were younger advisers present, and while they were confident and engaged, they were not the majority.
The Cape Town event had a slightly different texture, appeared to be more deliberate in approach, and had more one-on-one sessions. However, the generational picture was broadly similar. I’m not raising this as a criticism of the event organisers or the event itself, as it was evident that a deliberate effort was made to feature newer names alongside the established players. I’m raising it because the industry talks at length about serving a younger, more diverse client base. The evolution has started, but those of us having those conversations need to reflect that ambition more visibly.
I’d rather carry that responsibility than operate in a market where everyone already understands what you do – because that market is usually crowded and, quite frankly, outdated. And if a decade of conference rooms has taught me anything, it’s that the moment you think you’ve explained something well enough, is usually the moment to go back to the beginning.