This prestigious recognition affirms Carrick’s pioneering approach and celebrates the dedication of every team member who has helped establish the company as Africa’s benchmark for wealth management.

Carrick’s 10th anniversary celebrations were held within sight of the iconic Table Mountain in Cape Town (pictured above), signifying not only where our journey began, but representing our vantage point as we continue to expand our presence across Africa.

A vision rooted in legacy

“When Carrick was founded in 2014, the vision was to create a platform rooted in integrity, transparency, and a commitment to the long-term success of our clients. Our goal has always been to help individuals and families not only accumulate wealth but build lasting legacies, giving them peace of mind about their financial futures. Over the past 10 years, that vision has remained the foundation of everything we do, and it has been key to our success,” said Craig Featherby, founder of Carrick Wealth.

Pictured from left: Richard Goodall [CEO, Marlborough Group], Craig Feathery [Founder & CEO, Carrick Group], Andrew Staley [Chairman, Marlborough Group] and Mike Fannin [Founder & Non-Executive Director]. Building strong partnerships with industry leaders such as Marlborough remains central to Carrick’s vision of delivering world-class wealth management solutions across Africa.

Growth beyond borders

From serving a niche South African market, Carrick has expanded with eight offices across five African countries, with its Mauritius hub now offering services on a global scale. This growth reflects our unwavering dedication to building trust through performance and client-centric innovation.

Carrick’s ability to create personalised financial strategies, combined with strategic partnerships with world-class financial institutions, has raised the bar for wealth management in Africa.

Unmatched industry recognition

Carrick’s innovative approach has earned 34 industry awards, including consecutive wins for:
• Best Adviser Firm in South Africa (2020, 2022, 2023)
• Excellence in Client Service for Africa (2022, 2023)

These achievements highlight Carrick’s commitment to excellence and its ability to adapt in an ever-changing financial landscape. Despite global challenges and local market shifts, Carrick has remained a reliable partner, prioritizing trust and agility to help clients navigate opportunities and uncertainties.

Craig Featherby, CEO of the Carrick Group, inspiring collaboration and growth at a conference that brought together our leadership team, business partners, and product providers to shape the future.

A commitment to community impact

Beyond financial excellence, Carrick is deeply committed to community development. To mark this 10-year milestone, staff across all offices stepped away from their desks to make a difference in their local communities. Activities ranged from painting community centres and planting gardens to preparing food parcels and making sandwiches for the hungry.

This Day of Service reflects our belief that true wealth lies in giving back and highlights Carrick’s broader commitment to social responsibility. We are dedicated to ensuring that business success goes hand in hand with community welfare.

Looking ahead: Expanding across Africa

“While we are proud of our achievements, we believe our best days are ahead. We remain committed to innovation, empowering our clients through education, and staying at the forefront of industry trends,” Featherby emphasized.

“With an eye on the next decade, we will focus on building long-term partnerships, expanding our footprint, and investing in sustainable strategies that benefit both our clients and communities. As part of our expansion plan, we are currently working on securing licenses in Botswana, Nigeria, and Kenya, with additional plans to enter 15 more African markets in the coming years.”

A grateful celebration of partnerships and opportunities

As Carrick reflects on this incredible decade, we express deep gratitude for the relationships that have shaped our success. We are excited about the opportunities that lie ahead and remain committed to building a better financial future for Africa and beyond.

With integrity, passion, and a focus on service, Carrick embarks on the next chapter of shaping Africa’s financial future—empowering individuals, strengthening families, and transforming communities for generations to come.

In a statement on 6 September AILO said that regular premium products are firmly embedded in the DNA of the cross-border life sector.

Back in the day, this was the ‘Origin of Species’ product structure that met the needs of foreign nationals working abroad, long before single premium products became a major feature of this market.

More than 40 years on, times, tastes and certainly regulatory attitudes have changed, so that regular premium products, whilst still the main source of business for some AILO Members, no longer dominate the sale of cross-border life products in the way they once did.

This recent survey by AILO conducted with its members aimed to identify why this is the case and what, if anything, can be done to address the relative decline of this form of business.

The survey results confirmed much of the current thinking on this issue:

• The AILO membership contains a great deal more ‘Experience’ of regular premium products compared to those businesses and individuals who are currently ‘Active’ in promoting them.
• The main reasons given for this were ‘greater point-of-sale cost transparency’ and ‘restrictions on initial commission payments’.
• 77% of respondents believe that this pattern of decline can be reversed, but there was a lack of consensus regarding how this can be achieved.
• Survey participants believe that delivering better customer value for money should be the main focus of future regular premium propositions.

The survey also highlighted that cross-border regular premium products are not a homogeneous group, rather they split into four segments:

• Group Savings products continue to form a lucrative if niche segment of this market, targeting multinational and regional companies with employee benefits solutions. This remains perhaps the most persistent and stable form of business in this sector.
• Group Protection, working hand in had with Group Savings solutions, is another niche and highly competitive segment providing profitable opportunities for a small number of specialist providers.
• Individual Protection products have seen the biggest decline in activity, but this is in part linked to the decline in Individual Savings Plans as both product groups seek to target a similar younger customer demographic.
• Individual Savings Plans not only continue to be the most active product group, but they also dominate the culture surrounding this product set, and are the main focus of the feedback, written and verbal, in this survey.

The survey report concludes that if the relative decline in regular premium business is to be addressed, the Individual Savings Plan is where the effort needs to be focused.

Consolidating the survey inputs and follow-up discussions with participants, the report goes on analyse the three stakeholders to Individual Savings Plans (customer, distributor and product provider), in order to identify the principal objectives of each and to assess these against the three generic remuneration models operating in this market.

Based on the survey responses and subsequent discussions, plus the stakeholder analysis, the report ends by proposing a Future Individual Savings Plan proposition that aims to create a more equitable share of the product’s economic value, one that’s better aligned with delivering better value for money for customers that’s consistent with current regulatory trends, as well as targeting a younger demographic.

AILO CEO Bob Pain said: “For those of us who’ve been around this sector for a long time, the promotion of regular premium products is an activity many of us are familiar with, but one that has become a less evident feature for many in recent years.

“What is most encouraging about this survey is that this knowledge and expertise within the sector hasn’t gone away and is capable of being collectively harnessed via AILO to help develop the potential product solutions of the future”.

The Regular Premium Product Survey Report is available exclusively to AILO Members on request to the secretariat@ailo.org
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If you are, you’re not alone. Statistics announced at the Empowering Advice Through Technology expo (#EATT2024) showed that 95% of UK IFAs aim to invest more in technology, and almost half are looking to change the platform they’re using. A greater choice of platforms, and new technologies such as AI, are obvious developments that are driving this trend, but there are more factors at play too.

That’s the view of Richard Knights, head of sales at Centology in this specialist sector of the IFA-focused tech market: “2024 could be a real tipping point both in terms of the number of UK advisers who are embracing technology, and the types of platforms they are using. It’s true that many IFAs have been early adopters of wealth management technology but, as we have also seen in some other financial services sectors, there has been a degree of inertia too.

“That’s understandable, especially for IFAs who may worry that the work involved in migrating to a new platform could create bigger problems in the short term than it solves in the long term. However, from Centology’s viewpoint we can see that attitudes across the financial advisory sector are changing as more and better solutions become available, so 2024 could be a significant year.”

Frustration with the limits of incumbent wealth management technologies is shared by many UK IFAs today, Knight said. “The feedback we receive from many advisers is that they want a high-level of integration which avoids the need for repeated re-keying and duplication of data. Most importantly, IFAs are looking for solutions which offer a seamless, hassle-free migration to a genuine fully-integrated platform which meets ISO standards. They want comprehensive solutions which will offer a clear return on investment in terms of improving efficiency and customer service.

“Bespoke client portals and dashboards, automated workflows and task management, plus digital KYC and onboarding are among the many features advisers are looking for platforms to provide. While some platforms have offered a few of these key features, until recently it’s been necessary to ‘bolt on’ additional features and functions from other sources too.

“What makes things different now is that Centology and other businesses in this sector are offering a truly integrated solution, and we can see that this is having an impact on addressing the inertia in sections of the industry which has perhaps slowed the pace of change in the past. The EATT research stats clearly show there’s a strong interest in investing in this type of technology.

“We’re expecting the increased availability of cost-effective, comprehensive solutions which meet the current and future needs of IFAs to translate into increased levels of adoption. We say that for two main reasons. Firstly, because advisers want to keep pace with their competitors, and secondly because they can see the added value the latest technology provides, both in terms of efficient management of higher numbers of clients and the quality of service it delivers.”

“As is the case in many other sectors, the ever-increasing power of AI creates rewards, and risks, in the financial advice sector too. “Advisers will of course be looking for simple, efficient and scalable solutions when choosing the best platform to suit their and their clients’ needs,” said Knights.

“But in the context of what AI can do, and how it’s currently being used in the context of applications related to Consumer Duty compliance for example, it’s also essential to consider how this can impact data protection and security.

This is an important factor to consider when IFAs are looking to choose a wealth management platform provider. Leading providers today are taking a measured approach to AI so that its power is used to improve efficiency, but at the same time includes safeguards to ensure compliance. While technology will continue to transform how advisers do business, from a clients’ point of view trust in their IFA will continue to be as important as it has always been.”

Were you to track regulatory changes over time, you would see a clear direction of travel. Aligning your suitability processes with this direction can transform meeting the rules from a burden to a competitive advantage.

You do this by shifting your focus from the letter of the laws – what they say: the isolated boxes to tick; to their spirit – why they exist: to ensure good client outcomes.

A focus on the boxes to be ticked rather than the reasons the boxes exist can lead to laws being technically followed at the expense of meeting the very outputs the laws are there to produce.

The spirit of financial advisory regulations is clear: to protect clients from bad investments, from unscrupulous salesmen, and even from the clients themselves. They aim to increase a client’s comfort and confidence with investing – to arm them with a greater understanding of what they’re investing in, and why.

The letter of the regulations says you must account for a client’s risk tolerance, knowledge and experience, and so on. But that’s not really what the regulations are after. Because it’s perfectly possible to ‘account’ for these in a counterproductive way.

See also: All I want for Easter is the findings of the FCA’s thematic review

For example, in its 2011 guidance, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) stated that they’d ‘reviewed 11 risk-profiling tools and were concerned to find that nine tools had weaknesses which could, in certain circumstances, lead to flawed outputs.’ And in its 2023 MiFID II guidance, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) spelled out: ‘In assessing a client’s knowledge and experience, a firm should also avoid using overly broad questions with a yes/no type of answer and or a very broad tick-the-box self-assessment approach.’

It pays to ask why these guidelines exist. Shouldn’t the rules themselves be enough, without requiring separate guidelines on how to follow them? The regulators would not have bothered releasing additional guidelines if the ways the risk tolerance and knowledge and experience boxes were typically ticked were good enough. The problem wasn’t what was being done, it was the way in which it was being done.

This is arguably even more apparent in the way Mifid II guidance and the Consumer Duty rules have incorporated the requirement to account for client behaviours. For example, the need not only to tell a client something but to take reasonable steps to make sure they have actually understood it.

We see something similar too with the new Sustainability Disclosure Requirements and their guidance to tackle greenwashing.

See also: Advisers have rich opportunity to treat investors more like humans, not robots

Problems of a checklist-focused approach to suitability

It is undoubtedly tempting to believe that methodologically extracting each requirement from the lines of legislation and ensuring they’re covered in some way will add up to a clean bill of regulatory health. However, this decontextualised line-by-line approach has some practical pitfalls:

1. It encourages ineffective upfront loading – Confirming the right level of investment risk for a client prior to investing is non-negotiable. But that right level is subject to dynamic change. Understanding of both the client and how they interact with their investments naturally grows over time. Outputs also decay. Of the main elements of suitability, only risk tolerance is broadly stable across time. Trying to get everything out of the way as soon as possible is effective for a checklist, but counterproductive for a client outcome.
2. It hinders client understanding – A client’s understanding of what they’re investing in (and why) is not helped by haste or volume, or by the lack of a clear link between information requested and its ultimate importance for them.
3. It leaves advisers playing catch-up – A focus on the letter of the law can leave advisers feeling like they’re playing a constant game of catch-up: tweaking processes, and bolting-on additional steps to meet each new requirement. However, reacting to regulatory changes is less efficient than anticipating them. A focus on the spirit of the laws should ensure that regulatory requirements are met as a side-effect of following processes designed for other purposes.

Future-proofing your suitability processes

It could be argued that all talk of ‘spirit’ is a bit unscientific, and no defence against a regulatory judge. This would be wrong. It is far more dangerous to rely on blind box-ticking with evidence only of the answer, not the process, or the reason, or what the question was, or why it was being asked.

This isn’t about abandoning the checklists in favour of assuming that if a client is comfortable then all is well. It is simply about where to angle your attention. To see that the best suitability processes focus less on acquiring client knowledge for the purposes of ticking boxes, and much more on how we use this knowledge in coherent suitability frameworks that reflect an understanding of what truly matters to investors.

The FCA has said the review will be “an important indicator of how firms are implementing the Consumer Duty”.

Our own research report, Life Beyond Work: The changing face of retirement suggests that many advisers recognise they may need to revise their approach to retirement advice but would value some clear direction from the regulator before doing so. It therefore seems inevitable the review will find some areas where change is needed.

I’m hopeful, perhaps even confident, that the regulator will recognise how challenging providing effective retirement advice is. It is almost certainly the most difficult financial planning problem, full of uncertainty and technical complexity.

See also: Advisers say economic climate prompting clients to change retirement plans

While there will always be room for improvement, it’s important that the FCA and industry can work constructively to ensure the supply of quality retirement advice is expanded, not constrained further. While retirement advice is important today, it’s set to become even more so for all involved.

Client needs in retirement are pretty consistent – to maintain their standard of living until they die and not run out of money. However, client circumstances are changing. The decline of defined benefit pensions means the next generation of retirees will be more reliant on retirement savings than the boomer generation.

Sandwiched between ageing parents and boomerang kids, many of today’s retirees also face greater demands on their wealth than their parents did. Add in more complex family structures and meeting those core client needs becomes even more difficult. Retirement advice will become even more complex and increasing its accessibility will be key.

Assets for clients who are approaching, at, or in retirement already constitute the majority of advised assets and almost certainly generate the lion’s share of adviser fees. The need for ongoing advice in retirement is, to my mind, indisputable, at least for clients who remain invested.

See also: Most investors not reviewing their pensions annually, research finds

Keeping clients on track against their retirement plan, helping them optimise their tax position, and navigating the inevitable bumps in the road are all value-added activities that merit an ongoing fee.

Demand doesn’t seem to be an issue either. Only 16% of advisers told us that attracting new retirement clients was a business challenge for them. With fee pressure mounting and challenges around the value of advice, retirement clients are likely to become even more important to adviser businesses and those that support them.

Success story

Effective and affordable retirement advice is also essential from a government perspective. The introduction of automatic enrolment has been a huge success by almost any measure. However, it can only achieve its policy objective of improving retirement living standards if participants have the right support when deciding how to access benefits.

Evidence to date suggests that many can and do make irrational decisions when accessing benefits, drawing too much income and/or paying too much tax. As pension pots grow, the importance of converting assets to sustainable income will increase. While the FCA’s recent thoughts on enhancing guidance may help people avoid some retirement mistakes they will not be a substitute for advice.

An effective and efficient retirement advice market is essential for all participants – clients, advisers, financial services firms, and government. To achieve this, we need to work together to take on the challenges of changing client circumstances and the more hostile market and economic environment that we’ve seen in recent years.

A pragmatic and constructive approach to developing the regulation of retirement advice is essential to achieving this and the FCA’s thematic review will set the tone for this important discussion. I hope the Easter Bunny doesn’t disappoint.

Richard Parkin is head of retirement at BNY Mellon Investment Management